In honor of National Library Week, which was the second week of April, I wanted to write about the Father of Librarianship, Melvil Dewey. Now before you decide to turn the page, this guy was an incredible character. His contributions to American librarianship were numerous.
He was born in 1851 to a relatively poor family. Like me, and many other people, he worked his way through college by working at the college library. He went to Amherst and became frustrated with the way they kept track of the books there. So at the age of 21, he invented a better classification system that became known as the Dewey Decimal System.
His accomplishments continued as he started a company called the Library Bureau to provide libraries with equipment and furnishings that still exists today. He also started the American Library Association, which consistently lobbies for your right to free speech and your right to reading privacy. The first library school, at what is now Columbia University, was started by Dewey. Without ever consulting with his superiors, he accepted the first women ever admitted to the school. He was denied classroom space after that but continued the library classes anyway, using a storeroom above the chapel across the street from the library. He eventually got fired from Columbia.
Later, Dewey moved to Albany, N.Y., where he became the state librarian of New York and started another library school.
It was Melvil Deweys idea to change the Library of Congress from a research library for members of Congress to the national library that it is today.
Melvil Dewey was absolutely obsessed with saving time. He formed the Spelling Reform Association and invented a whole new way of writing English that was completely phonetic. For example, his last name went from Dewey to Dui. He would be so proud of how the written language has been changed by people who text! He was so certain that phonetic spelling would catch on that he stated, A few years ago it required some hardihood for an educated man to declare himself in favor of simplified spelling, but since the founding of the Spelling Reform Association in 1876 every prominent student of English living, both American and foreign, has conceded that scholarship, as well as common sense, requires the change which is quietly but steadily going forward.
Dewey also promoted the idea that America should move from the British system of weights and measures to the metric system. While neither the spelling idea nor the metric system caught on, 140 years later we are still using his library classification system.
Dewey was a womanizer and was sometimes in hot water for inappropriate behavior.
Later in his life, he and his wife, Annie, started a resort community in an area in the Adirondack Mountains that he dearly loved. He named it the Lake Placid Club. In his social reformation style, the resort was organized in devotion to spiritual, cultural and social enrichment. In later years, Dewey imported skis, built toboggan runs, and had separate skating rinks built for curling, hockey and figure skating. He also built the first ski jump. Each year collegiate competitions drew crowds of up to 2,000 to watch jumpers fly more than 160 feet.
Deweys son, Godfrey, was the president of the 1932 Lake Placid Olympic Winter Games. Many people give him single-handed credit for bringing the games to Lake Placid.
A contemporary of Deweys, Nicholas Murray Butler, observed that Dewey went so far and so fast ... he sawed off the limb upon which he was sitting. He was developer, inventor and social reformer, and he was almost always controversial. But as a librarian, he left an indelible mark on American libraries and librarianship.
Joanie Howland is director of the Cortez Public Library, 202 N. Park St. She can be reached at 565-8117.
