> It seems to be Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" written at the very top of the library punch cards.

Each card has some text printed on the top row. The bulk of the card is a grid of pre-printed numbers. Punching out holes on the card lets you represent data in a standardised character format, where successive columns represent individual characters (from top to bottom). For example, in the IBM 80-column format [0]. The text printed on the top of a card makes individual cards human-readable.

When I first encountered computers, in approx 1979, this was how we programmed them. Now get off my lawn, with your new-fangled glass-teletypes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#IBM_80-column_for...

Those are the kind of punch cards that were used as the main method to introduce programs or any other kind of numeric or textual data into old computers, before the mid seventies, when the floppy disks became popular.

Like the telephone with a dial disk or the monitor with a CRT screen, this is an unfamiliar object for not too old computer programmers.

Nevertheless, there was a time when writing any computer program required it to be punched on such cards, one 80-character line per card, then you could read your program like with this Jane Austen example and you had to be exceedingly careful to not spill down the cards on the floor, or you would have to do a lot of work to sort them again in the correct order of the program lines.

this might provide some background:

https://www.masswerk.at/card-readpunch/