Many have spoken of "books as wallpaper" or "intellectual furniture", but here Mortimer J. Adler goes beyond owning them solely as material culture, but turning them into intellectual and personal culture.

When they sit upon the shelf after being intellectually owned, they can serve as a mnemonic touchstone, which is a method of supercharging their value as lowly "decorative wallpaper", and instead making them living active, intellectual wallpaper.

I love the idea of "intellectual furniture" though I've seen it in negative contexts before. Compare also with "books as wallpaper".

the phrase "intellectual furniture" is sort of painful here...

A fascinating combination of office furniture types in 1906!

The Adjustable Table Company of Grand Rapids, Michigan manufactured a combination table for both telephones and index cards. It was designed as an accessory to be stood next to one's desk to accommodate a telephone at the beginning of the telephone era and also served as storage for one's card index.

Given the broad business-based use of the card index at the time and the newness of the telephone, this piece of furniture likely was not designed as an early proto-rolodex, though it certainly could have been (and very well may have likely been) used as such in practice.

I totally want one of these as a side table for my couch/reading chair for both storing index cards and as a temporary writing surface while reading!

This could also be an early precursor to Twitter!

Folks have certainly mentioned other incarnations: - annotations in books (person to self), - postcards (person to person), - the telegraph (person to person and possibly to others by personal communication or newspaper distribution)

but this is the first version of short note user interface for both creation, storage, and distribution by means of electrical transmission (via telephone) with a bigger network (still person to person, but with potential for easy/cheap distribution to more than a single person)