More About Melville

Although I am no paragon of normalcy, I must say that Melville Dewey, the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System, was an odd bird.  Although he had a huge impact on the world of libraries (the OCLC calls him the “father of modern librarianship” ) he was known for his difficult personality, his ability to make enemies everywhere he went and his dogmatic views.  And then there’s the racism and womanizing.  He was quite a guy.   

Dewey was a fellow New Yorker, born in 1851  during a time when central New York was overflowing with religious revivals and reform movements.  The Mormons, Millerites, Abolitionists, Oneida Society and Shakers all called the upstate wilderness of New York home.  This environment may have encouraged Dewey’s  life long  devotion to improve and organize his world.  
To begin with, he hated wasting time and strove to use every minute of the day.   Anna Elliott writes that when Melville was a boy he  inventoried and organized his mother’s pantry, without asking, for “fun”.  Soon after he arrived at Amherst College,  he created his famous Dewey Decimal System and eventually  became the school’s librarian.  The system was based on previous cataloguing efforts, but Dewey’s  combined them and made an easy to use system that was efficient and effective (no more time wasting!).   The system caught on quickly across the country and around the world.

Dewey also believed passionately in the reform of spelling (only a librarian or a teacher could actually get fired up about  spelling).  Apparently, there was a movement called the Spelling Reform Association that advocated phonetic spelling - wouldn’t my 4th graders love that!   Dewey wrote, “"Speling Skolars agree that we hav the most unsyentifik, unskolarli, illojikal & wasteful speling ani languaj ever ataind."  For a time he even changed his name to Melvil Dui.  Wow.

In 1895 Dewey founded the Lake Placid Club, a private sports club in the Adirondacks and inspired Americans to try winter sports - by 1932 Lake Placid had gained enough attention to host the Olympics.  Unfortunately, Dewey attempted to organize the membership of the club as he had organized the library.  Members to the club were accepted based on their physical health, moral and social standing  and their race.  This precluded people from the tuberculosis  sanatoriums, smokers, drinkers and, because of his prejudice, the entire Jewish community (quite prominent in the area at the time).  His stand made the N.Y. Board of Regents a little uneasy and eventually led to Dewey resigning his board position.  
Dewey will need a few more entries, he wasted very few minutes in 80 years and made many waves.  He started the first Library School at Columbia, was the edictor of  the Library Journal and one of the founders of the American Library Association.  The one thing Melvil didn’t do much of was read.  He was never known to discuss or recommend books, he really just wanted to organize them, what a shame.