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A clerk at the Prague city library showed me how to find books pulled from the shelves after 1968
She said the old card catalog still listed them under their real titles, so I spent 3 hours cross-checking cards against the shelves and found 11 titles that were never re-cataloged after the purge, has anyone else used old catalogs to trace what got quietly removed?
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baker.ben17d ago
There's a whole book about this kind of thing, I forget the exact name but it covered how libraries behind the Iron Curtain kept two sets of records. The public shelves had one version and the back office stuff had another. Card catalogs were basically secret maps if you knew what to look for. Three hours for 11 titles sounds about right, that cross-checking is slow work but weirdly satisfying. Makes you wonder how many other libraries still have their old cards just sitting there.
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