reply to u/atomicnotes at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1fa0240/early_1900s_3_x_5_inch_card_index_filing_cabinet/

This is an excellent question. I strongly suspect you won't find a booklet or book from Macey after 1906 that does this, though there may have been something before that.

You'll notice that on page 9, the 1906 Macy Catalog takes what I consider to be a pot shot at their Shaw-Walker competition in the section "Not a kindergarten". Shaw-Walker was selling not just furniture, but a more specific system, as well as a magazine. Since there's something to be learned for current knowledge managers and zettel-casters in the historical experience of these companies and the systems and methods they were selling, I'll quote that section here (substitute references to enterprise and business for yourself):

Not a Kindergarten

Every successful enterprise knows its own requirements best, and develops the best system for its own purpose. We manufacture business machinery. Our appliances and supplies are boiled down to a few parts, and simple forms, and will accommodate any system in any business. The office boy can understand and use them. If we undertook to teach the whole world how to run its business, we would have to saddle the cost on those who buy for what we tried to teach those who do not.

System in business is desirable, but no system can make a business successful, where the management is deficient. So called ‘Systems’ often result in useless expense and disappointment. We retain what experience proves useful and practical; so far as possible, eliminating all complicated and useless features. This explains how we can employ the best workmanship and material, combined with pleasing designs, and sell our goods with profit at lower prices than the inferior articles offered by others.

There may have been some booklets at some point, but I've not run across them for any of the major manufacturers of the time. (I've only loosely searched this area.) Some of the general principles were covered in various articles in System Magazine which was published by Shaw-Walker, a filing cabinet manufacturer, in the early century. System Magazine was sold to McGraw-Hill which renamed it Business Week, but it is now better known as Bloomberg Business Week. In the December 1906 issue of System, W. K. Kellogg, the President of the Toasted Corn Flake Company, is quoted touting the invaluable nature of the Shaw-Walker filing system at a time when his company was using 640 drawers of their system.

To some extent the smaller discrete "system" was really a part of a broader range of information and knowledge of business and competition. This can be seen in the fact that System Magazine still exists, just under an alternate name, along with a much broader area of business schools and business systems. We've just "forgotten" (or take for granted) the art of the smaller systems and processes which seemed new in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Other companies had "systems" they sold or taught, much like Tiago Forte teaches his "Second Brain" method or Nick Milo teaches "Linking Your Thinking". However, most of them were really in the business of selling goods: furniture, filing cabinets, desks, index cards, card dividers, etc. and this was where the real money was to be found at the time.

A similar example in the space is the Memindex System booklet that came with their box and index cards. The broad principles of the system can be described in a few paragraphs so that the average person can read it and modify it to their particular needs or use case. The company never felt the need to write an entire book along the lines of David Allen's Getting Things Done or Ryder Carroll's Bullet Journal Method. Allen and Carroll are selling systems by way of books or classes. Admittedly, Carroll does have custom printed notebooks for using his methods, but I suspect these are a tiny fraction of the overall notebook sales for those who use his method.

Here's evidence of a correspondence course from the Library Bureau some time after 1927, which was when they'd been purchased by Remington Rand: https://www.ebay.com/itm/335534180049 . Library Bureau had an easier time as their system was standardized for libraries, though they did have efforts to cater to business concerns the way Shaw-Walker, The Macey Company, Globe-Wernicke and others certainly did.

I think the best examples in broader book form from that time period are Kaiser's two books which still stand up pretty well today for those creating knowledge management systems, zettelkasten, commonplace books, getting things done/productivity systems, second brains, etc.

Kaiser, J. Card System at the Office. The Card System Series 1. London: Vacher and Sons, 1908. http://archive.org/details/cardsystematoffi00kaisrich.

———. Systematic Indexing. The Card System Series 2. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1911. http://archive.org/details/systematicindexi00kaisuoft.

very organized

In 1983, at the dawn of the personal computer age, Apple Inc. in promotional film entitled "Lisa Soul Of A New Machine" touted their new computer, a 16-bit dual disk drive "personal office system", as something that would do away with "the cluttered desk, index cards, file folders, the in-out basket, [and] the calculator." (00:01)

Some of these things moved to the realm of the computer including the messy desk(top) now giving people two messy desks, a real one and a virtual one. The database-like structure of the card index also moved over, but the subjective index and its search power were substituted for a lower level concordance search.

30 years on, for most people, the value of the database idea behind the humble "index card" has long since disappeared and so it seems here as if it's "just" another piece of cluttery paper.

Appreciate the rosy framing of the juxtaposition of "past" and "future" jumping over the idea of the here and now which includes the thing they're selling, the Lisa computer. They're selling the idealized and unclear future even though it's really just today.

Julius Kaiser contemporaneously posits that mass manufacture and maximizing efficiency (greater output for minimum input) are the primary drivers of card index system use in the early 20th century. These also improve both precision and accuracy in handling information which allow for better company or factory operation, which would have been rising concerns for businesses and manufacturing operations at the rise of scientific management during the time period.

optimization-procrastination trap is related to shiny object syndrome - the idea of tweaking one's system constantly

perfect tool trap - guess what? there isn't one

The Outline of Knowledge appears in the Propædia volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It is similar to various olther classification systems like the Dewey Decimal system or the Universal Decimal Classification.

Hahn, U., Lagnado, D., Lewandowsky, S., & Chater, N. (2020). Crisis knowledge management: Reconfiguring the behavioural science community for rapid responding in the Covid-19 crisis [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/hsxdk