America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built A Nation - Plot & Excerpts
Perhaps because I believe so firmly in decimals, of which I have been a life-long advocate and active missionary. I was born December 10, 1851, the anniversary of the deposit of the prototype meter in the Palace of the Archives in Paris. In 1872 I devised my decimal classification.…I am so loyal to decimals as our great labor saver that I even like to sleep decimally.—Melvil Dewey, 1926On the morning of Wednesday, January 5, 1887, Columbia College’s new library school was set to open. But the trustees of the college, then an all-male bastion located in midtown Manhattan, wanted to shut it down before its founder, the thirty-five-year-old Melvil Dewey, Columbia’s Librarian-in-Chief for the past four years, ever met the first class. As the handsome six-footer with the jet-black hair and bushy beard later recalled, he was suddenly immersed in “one of the sharpest battles of my life, for what I knew to be right.” The previous day, the chairman of Columbia’s committee on buildings, Charles Silliman, had informed Dewey that he would not have access to any classrooms.
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