Sutnar spent fourteen years inside the Mercer Catalog Bureau rewriting the rules of how industrial manufacturers presented information to architects and engineers. The work was not glamorous. It involved tens of thousands of product listings, each requiring precise dimensional data, material specifications, and ordering codes indexed against a classification system that had to survive annual revisions.
The Tab System Was Not Decoration
When you open a 1948 Mercer Catalog, the colored tabs along the right edge are not a design flourish. Each tab corresponds to a division number in the master index. The tab has to be visible from the closed edge of the book, sized to use, and locked to a fixed legend so the reader never memorizes the classification scheme.