East Kilbride, Carluke, Lanark and Hamilton, all Local Authority Libraries in the sixties, then Langside College, the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, Glasgow University Library (Floor six was Philosophy, Theology and Religion) and New College Library in Edinburgh - in all of these I learned the joy of the chase, the excitement of discovery and capture of new roads to knowledge.
When the microfiche came some of these libraries retained the index card drawers for a few years. When they were eventually gone, and computer technology made a library search a very different process, I missed them, and still do.
The physical pulling out of a meticulously ordered drawer, flipping through thousands and thousands of typed cards in alphabetical order, and some of them in subject category, often typed in purple, writing down the details in the notebook, and then chasing the book to its specified Dewey directed place on the shelf, hoping no one else had got there first and borrowed it.
Then at Glasgow Uni in 1971, the books that formed the basis of what became the Principles of Religion Class Prize Essay on "What was distinctive in the Israelite conception of God." These included Gerhard Von Rad's Old Testament Theology, Kenneth Cragg's The Call of the Minaret, and the quite wonderful book on Indian religions, The Wonder That Was India by A L Basham. And all of them waiting to be discovered in those wooden treasure chests we called an Index Catalogue.
Google is quicker, near inexhaustible, information as fast-food; the Index Catalogue was a work of meticulous and discriminating organisation, information as slowly assembled ingredients in a slow cooker. Or so it now seems to me.
And If I ever write a memoir, one of the chapters should be titled: "Prevenient Grace: Books that found me."
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