Melvil Dewey - “My World Work — Free Schools & Free Libraries for every soul.”

Teachable Moments: Melvil Dewey advocated structure as a means of betterment
Tennessean: 12.09.2013 by Frank Daniels III

One evening when he was 15, Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey determined what his life’s work would be. He bought a pair of cufflinks engraved with an “R,” which would serve as a reminder “that I was to give my life to reforming certain mistakes and abuses.”

Though Dewey, who was born Dec. 10, 1851, is best known for his reform of how libraries organize their materials — the Dewey Decimal Classification system that is now the most widely used method around the world — he did not limit his reformation efforts to how books should be shelved.

While in high school, Dewey worked as a door-to-door book salesman for the American Baptist Publication Society as well as working at his father’s shoe store in Adam’s Center, N.Y.

In 1870, he entered Amherst College, where his passion for reform found outlets.

An early outlet was the spelling reform movement, which sought to simplify and eliminate the irregularities in English words that made them so difficult to learn. He changed the spelling of his first name to Melvil to eliminate the “unnecessary” letters.

His passion for reform was in finding simplicity and efficiency, which drew him to the idea of shorthand for notes and drafting correspondence, and to the metric system for measurement.

To help pay his bills during school, he worked in the Amherst Library as the bookkeeper and became convinced that libraries offered a platform for his “R.” He wrote in his diary in December 1872, “My World Work — Free Schools & Free Libraries for every soul.”  READ MORE !

Melvil Dewey @ Library History Buff
Dewey Decimal System in Fiction @ Your Local Library