I took a lunchtime trip to Office Despot to get square-ruled index cards today, and found that the available options for carrying index cards around have increased since the last time I checked.

I didn't have a camera with me, and I can't find images for these, but I thought I'd tell y'all about them anyway. The maker of all these is Mead (the index cards were the Office Depot house brand).

I picked up an "index card carrier", which is translucent green plastic, 3x5, with square corners and curved front and back faces, and a hinged door that opens the top and part of the back. Possibly somewhat hard to describe, but it's basically a hard case for a hipster PDA. It claims to hold 50 index cards, and comes with 25; it only costs about two dollars. Because the front and back are curved, it fits into a front pants pocket somewhat more smoothly than a 3x5 notebook. I'm not sure I'll actually use this; I just bought it to see what it was like, and it was only $2 or so.

They have something essentially the same as a Moleskine Memo Pocket mini for $4 or so. The material of the folds is a bit thinner than the Memo Pocket, and the cover is cloth rather than whatever Moleskines are. On the positive side, the closure is somewhat better than a memo pocket: it's an elastic loop that goes over a flat hook on the front cover from the back. Could be nice if you couldn't find a Memo Pocket, or wanted one for cheaper.

There's also a somewhat larger, cloth-covered heavy cardboard box with a four-way elastic band that goes over the open top of the box to hold the cards in, and also holds one card to the front of the box. It looks like it would hold about 150 cards. This one is possibly a little dubious because it is too large for pocket use, but not large enough to hold all the index cards you'll ever accumulate.

Hopefully someone with extreme prodnography-fu will find pictures of all these and post them