America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (14 page)

“The 900 of 020 [was]…dark before 1873.”

So wrote Mary Krome, a student at the Florida State College for Women, to Dewey in a congratulatory letter upon his eightieth birthday. Translated from the lingo of the DDC back into English, Ms. Krome’s numbers allude to Dewey’s pivotal role in moving “the history of library science” out of the dark ages.

At Amherst College, where the small-town boy began his studies in September 1870, he found his true calling. The inspiration came not from any professor or course, but from the $12-a-month part-time job that he landed in the fall of 1872. Soon after the heavily indebted junior began keeping the account books at the college library, he could think of little else but how to organize its thirty thousand volumes. “My heart,” he wrote in March 1873, “is open to anything that is either decimal or about libraries.” That May, he cranked out a preliminary draft of his classification scheme—a system that is used to organize libraries to this day and was the starting point for many research projects in the PG (Pre-Google) Era. After earning his bachelor’s degree a year later, Dewey eagerly accepted a post as the chief assistant to the college’s librarian, William Montague, a foreign language professor. By May 1875, Dewey had put the entire collection in “proper order”; by the end of that year, he had completed his forty-two-page
A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a
Library
. The following spring, Dewey shelled out a dollar to obtain copyright protection for his forthcoming book, first published later that year.

Until the Amherst junior got on the case, America’s printed matter—its books and pamphlets—were in a state of total disorder. Each of the country’s roughly one thousand libraries, whether public or academic, relied on its own idiosyncratic classification system. The books at the Amherst library were arranged according to the shelf system, then the most common approach. Catalogers would give each volume a number identifying the particular shelf on which it was to be placed. This method, Dewey quipped, had one advantage—librarians who already knew where a book was located could easily find it in the dark. The disadvantages were many. As the number of books grew, every few years, staff members had to spend countless hours reclassifying and rearranging the entire collection. And empty spaces on the shelves that resulted from lost or damaged books were everywhere to be seen.

In early 1873, to clean up the mess at his place of employment—he wasn’t yet concerned with organizing all of America’s books—Dewey embarked on a tour of fifty libraries in the northeastern United States. The protocols used elsewhere were little better. Albany’s New York State Library, he was disappointed to learn, “arrange[d] the books alphabetically paying no attention to subjects.” Other systems that organized books by the color of their bindings or by their size struck him as equally ridiculous. Dewey also read widely about the fledgling science of classification. He was particularly impressed with an essay by William Torrey Harris, the director of the St. Louis Public Library, which suggested arranging material alphabetically by subject. Under a relative rather than fixed location system, rather than being assigned a specific place in the library, books would be organized in relation to one another. “Of this,” noted the man, who bonded more readily to abstract concepts than to other people, on February 22, 1873, “I am inclined to be a friend.” But the all-consuming quest went on. “For months,” he later wrote, “I dreamed day and night that there must be somewhere a satisfactory solution.” One Sunday that spring, while supposedly listening to a sermon by the college’s seventy-something president, the pastor William Stearns, he had his eureka moment. He would use “the simplest known symbols, the Arabic numerals as decimals…to number a classification of all human knowledge in print.”

Surprisingly, the 1876 masterpiece that would turn Dewey into a household name the world over did not list him (or anyone else) as its author. The only place his name appears in the first edition of his scheme is on the copyright page. In the preface, dated June 10 (his half birthday), Dewey lays out his framework. He divides books into ten classes, which are, in turn, subdivided into ten sections and into ten divisions. As a result, all knowledge falls under one thousand headings (one thousand was also the total of the print run). For example, a geometry book was to be numbered 513—as Natural Science is Class 500, Mathematics is Section 510, and Geometry is Division 513. The main difference between this first go-round and the DDC in use today was the absence of the decimal point per se; this addition has allowed for an infinite number of categories. In the second part of the book, Dewey lists the full contents of all ten classes, devoting one page to each. And in the final third, he provides an alphabetical subject index; under
G
, the reader can find “Geometry, 513” right above “Geometry analytical, 516.”

Dewey’s work, as he concedes in the preface, wasn’t entirely original: “In his varied reading, correspondence, and conversation on the subject, the author doubtless received suggestions and gained ideas which it is now impossible for him to acknowledge.” But due to its inherent simplicity and logic, his system caught on immediately. The timing couldn’t have been better. The public library, whose origins date back to only about 1850, was about to come into its own. In 1875, the whole country had just 257 branches, and small collections with as few as three hundred books were not uncommon. A huge time and space saver, Dewey’s decimals helped to spark a spectacular growth spurt over the next quarter century; by 1900, America would be festooned with some five thousand public libraries containing more than forty million volumes.

And since the publication of the original version, twenty-two editions of the DDC system have followed. The most recent, released in 2011, which comes to more than four thousand pages, governs the arrangement of books in more than two hundred thousand libraries across nearly 150 countries. Owned by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), based in Dublin, Ohio, since 1988, the DDC system is not in the public domain, as is commonly assumed. It is still a major revenue engine, as the OCLC charges libraries that use it at least $500 a year. Manhattan’s Library Hotel, which was inspired by the DDC—each of its ten floors corresponds to one of Dewey’s categories (for example, room 800.001 features erotic literature on its shelves)—learned this lesson the hard way; in 2003, OCLC’s lawyers sued the swanky rest stop for book lovers, located across the street from the New York Public Library, for triple its profits, alleging copyright infringement. The two sides subsequently reached an agreement.

It was just after 5 a.m. on April 10, 1876, and Melvil Dewey was already on the go. He had to catch the 6:15 a.m. train to Boston. After six years in sleepy Amherst, the rapid-fire talker with the high-pitched voice, who had recently deleted the
le
from his given name because he considered it “Frenchy,” was off to the big city to seek fame and fortune.

While Dewey was excited to be entering the “busy world,” he was also sad to be leaving “college seclusion.” In Amherst, Dewey had enjoyed some relief from the loneliness and alienation that had plagued his childhood. After graduation, he boarded with Mrs. S. F. Pratt, a wealthy widow of a Turkish missionary, with whom he formed a close relationship. This mother of three young children asked him both to manage her investments and to help her with budgeting. Dewey, whose own parents had shown him little affection, referred to his landlady as “Mother.” And for the first time in his life, Dewey was popular with members of the fair sex—to make their acquaintance, he rarely missed services at the local Congregational church. With dating as with decimals, Dewey could never get his fill; the peripatetic bachelor would sometimes escort home two or three different women in the same evening. In January 1875, as he noted in his characteristic shorthand, he was courting both Mary E. and “the 34-year-old girl that I lykt so much… [I]… 1/2 thot of wedding.” (Ever since high school, he had griped about the messiness of his native tongue—“English spelling,” he once quipped, “is the wurst there is”—and he would be a lifelong advocate of simplified or phonetic spelling.) But the other 1/2 of Dewey would not budge, and no proposal was ever made to the woman more than a full decade his senior. By March 1875, Mary E. was also out of the picture—though she would pop back in a couple of years later—and Dewey was “having a good time” with both Mrs. H. and Hatty D. All told, between 1872 and 1876, Dewey romanced about twenty different women, including three Marys, three Mays, and three already-marrieds. Attachment to one woman at a time would be something to which he never could quite acclimate himself.

In an interview in Boston in early 1876, Dewey had finalized his new business venture. It was a dream come true. The publisher Edwin Ginn had signed Dewey on as a junior partner, appointing him manager of the company’s new American Metric Bureau. Dewey’s chief responsibility would be selling educational tools such as scales and charts designed to persuade the entire country to adopt the metric system. Dewey had long fantasized about doing away with America’s “inconsistent system” of weights and measures. In a high school essay, he had argued that the metric system’s “great superiority over all others consists in the fact that all its scales are purely decimal.”

Dewey’s last day at the Amherst library was Friday, March 31, 1876. He could have left town then, but his fervent worship of decimals led him to delay his journey until a week from the following Monday—April 10. The man, who hated vacations as a matter of principle, spent a few days engaging in his favorite hobbies such as horseback riding and hunting. Saturday the eighth turned out to be a disaster. That evening, he and “Mother had a misunderstanding.” “She of course,” he wrote in his diary, “had a big cry and I of course had to pacify her, all of which was less restful than sleep would have been.” Though tired, Dewey felt better on Sunday: “We had several little crys among the family during the day but got on very happily otherwise.” That afternoon, he boosted his sagging spirits by “talking library” at the home of his former boss, Professor Montague. But he still couldn’t shake the existential anxiety that had engulfed him. “It was a sad day,” he wrote in his diary shortly after retiring to bed at 9, “for I feared it would be my last.”

On moving day, Dewey squeezed in a four-hour stopover in Worcester, where he thoroughly examined the wares of the new Wesson and Harrington firearms store. Everything about guns and their construction had long fascinated Dewey, and he posed a series of probing questions to the owner, Frank Wesson. After an extended discussion, Dewey became convinced “he [Wesson] had the best pocket and long range rifles on the market.” As with other obsessives such as Jefferson and Lindbergh, new gadgets could leave him feeling spellbound. That evening, the new sales rep found some temporary lodgings in Malden, a short commute from his office at 13 Tremont Place in downtown Boston. On the morning of the eleventh, he met with the librarian Charles Cutter of the Boston Athenaeum—Beantown was then a library mecca, and this elegant venue was just one of its prominent shrines—to get some feedback on his new “skeme.” The meteoric rise of an American icon was now under way.

Eighteen seventy-six was to be an annus mirabilis for Dewey. Within a few weeks, Ginn agreed to expand his job description to include both selling library supplies and editing a new journal for librarians. As the managing editor of the
American Library Journal
—to reflect its international aspirations, the adjective was soon dropped from the title—Dewey suddenly had a huge platform. “Born with a disposition to run things whenever I could get a chance,” as Dewey noted five decades later in his unpublished memoir, “3/4 of a Century,” he immediately made the most of the opportunity. That spring, he became the prime mover behind a national gathering of librarians at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, thus organizing the conference that would, in turn, create the American Library Association. Unknown to some and dismissed by others—in a line that circulated widely, an Amherst philosophy professor described Dewey to the Librarian of Congress as “a tremendous talker, and a little bit of an old maid”—he initially faced stiff opposition. Wary of the newcomer, the head of the Chicago Public Library wrote to his counterpart in Boston on May 31: “It won’t pay for you and me to attend that barbecue.” But Dewey was not to be deterred, promising his colleagues that they would experience “the most profitable three days of their library life.” Thanks largely to Dewey’s infectious enthusiasm, 103 librarians from around the country—including those head honchos from Boston and Chicago who were to become the ALA’s first president and vice president, respectively—showed up at the Pennsylvania State Historical Society on October 4, 1876. Two days later, Dewey signed on as the ALA’s first member and was elected both its secretary and treasurer. Librarianship, as Dewey stressed, was officially a “profession.” And with his classification text now required reading for his colleagues around the country, the ALA’s youngest member would soon forever change how America both organized and disseminated information.

This flurry of activity would, however, leave Dewey close to a nervous breakdown by the time he hit the quarter century mark on December 10, 1876.

Dewey’s classification text also turned out to be the magnet that would attract his first wife. On April 18, 1876, he crossed the Charles River into Cambridge to give a lecture at Harvard “on locating books by numbers and subjects and not by numbering shelves,” as the college’s librarian recorded in his diary. Annie Godfrey, then the twenty-five-year-old librarian at the newly established Wellesley College, just happened to be in attendance. Three months later, Dewey sent her a proof of his book, offering “to answer any questions that may arise and…to receive any corrections or criticisms that may occur to you.” They picked up the dialogue about decimals a few months later at the librarians’ powwow in Philadelphia, where Annie became ALA Member No. 29. Admiring his “devotion to…[his] life work,” the frumpy and slightly overweight librarian, who shared his passion for horseback riding, became the pursuer. For the next year and a half, Dewey kept her at arm’s length. He cited overwork, a claim that was partly true. In late 1876, after his string of successes, Dewey felt drained and confused about what to do for an encore. He also began having trouble carrying out daily tasks. That November, a despairing and humbled Dewey, who had endured considerable criticism from his parents as a boy, begged Richard Bowker, his editor at
Library Journal
, to give him “a blowing up for my weaknesses.… It makes me shiver, but I know the final effect is good.” He rebounded, but slowly. At the first annual meeting of the ALA in the fall of 1877, the overtaxed workaholic achieved little besides standardizing the size of a catalog card at 7.5 × 12.5 centimeters.