Book description
The history of how a deceptively ordinary piece of office furniture transformed our relationship with information
The ubiquity of the filing cabinet in the twentieth-century office space, along with its noticeable absence of style, has obscured its transformative role in the histories of both information technology and work. In the…
- Coming soon!
Why read it?
1 author picked The Filing Cabinet as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Do filing cabinets matter anymore? I asked myself this question as I popped open Robertson’s book, quickly to find that these storage cabinets have a tremendous amount to teach us about “information” in the present moment.
Robertson demonstrates how the filing cabinet, through its vertical storage, became a “skyscraper” for the office, and this spatial arrangement not only influenced what information was but how it should be organized.
I love the fantastic archival images in the book, which made a humble and even “boring” technology incredibly relatable and vivid. At the same time, I appreciated Robertson’s ruminations on gender and…
From Rachel's list on technologies that seem boring but aren’t.
If you love The Filing Cabinet...
Aggressor
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Want books like The Filing Cabinet?
Our community of 12,000+ authors has personally recommended 46 books like The Filing Cabinet.
Share your top 3 reads of 2025!
And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.
1,210
readers submitted
so far, will you?
📚 If you like The Filing Cabinet, you might also like...
Old Man Country
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
Lane and the Inventor
A grumpy-sunshine, slow-burn, sweet-and-steamy romance set in wild and beautiful small-town Colorado. Lane Gravers is a wanderer, adventurer, yoga instructor, and social butterfly when she meets reserved, quiet, pensive Logan Hickory, a loner inventor with a painful past.
Dive into this small-town, steamy romance between two opposites who find love…
