The Efficient, Inventive (Often Annoying) Melvil Dewey

Written by Alexis O'Neill and Edwin Fotheringham

Narrated by Jonathan Todd Ross

Melvil Dewey loved order (Organize mother’s jelly jars), efficiency (Why spell his name Melville when Melvil has fewer letters and sounds the same?), and keeping records (Height! Weight! Earnings!).

Melvil also loved books and numbers and decimals. When he realized every library organized their books differently (Size! Title! Color!), he wondered if he could invent a system all libraries could use to ORGANIZE them EFFICIENTLY.

A rat-a-tat speaker, Melvil was a persistent (and noisy) advocate for FREE public libraries. And he made enemies along the way as he pushed for changes. (Like his battle to establish the first library school with WOMEN as students.) Through it all he was EFFICIENT, INVENTIVE, and often ANNOYING as
he made big changes in the world of public libraries—changes still found in the libraries of today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889560777

Reviews for The Efficient, Inventive (Often Annoying) Melvil Dewey

[nbmars · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The author describes Melvil Dewey as annoying, because he was controlling, demanding, and manipulative. Okay, he was also racist, misogynist, and anti-Semitic, but the author confines that information to one paragraph of the Author’s Note at the end of the book. In any event, Dewey was gripped by the overpowering compulsion to organize everything, in order to facilitate access and use of anything, from a collection of spices to a collection of books.He eventually established the Dewey Decimal System for library books, and even founded a school for librarians at Columbia University.In the back matter, the author describes how the Dewey Decimal System works for classifying a book about elephants, but never includes an outline of the system’s categories.Illustrations by Edwin Fotheringham use a pleasant cartoon technique to convey Dewey as an obsessive non-stop whirlwind.The narrative is quite selective, and could even be described, in an appropriately meta way, as quite annoying.