📖The Greats

During the Fronde rebellion, Naudé watched his life's work destroyed by politics: in 1652 the Parlement of Paris, moving against the exiled Mazarin, ordered the cardinal's property sold, and the library Naudé had spent a decade assembling book by book across Europe was dispersed at auction. Naudé spent his own savings to buy back the medical books, then accepted Queen Christina of Sweden's invitation to Stockholm. When Mazarin returned to power and began reassembling the collection, Naudé set out for home — and died at Abbeville in 1653, en route to his library.

Testifying before a parliamentary committee in 1836, the refugee librarian declared his ambition that the poorest student in Britain should have the same means of pursuing learning as the richest man in the kingdom — and then built it: he enforced legal deposit against reluctant publishers, drove the printed-book collection from roughly 240,000 to over 540,000 volumes, and sketched the domed Reading Room himself, its 140-foot span rising in the Museum's courtyard in 1857. The state that had sentenced him to death watched Britain knight him in 1869.

When Columbia's trustees refused to admit women to his new School of Library Economy, Dewey held the first class anyway on 5 January 1887 — seventeen of its twenty students women — in an unused storeroom above the chapel, off the trustees' books. The gambit helped cost him his Columbia post; the school followed him to Albany in 1889. The same man was later forced from ALA leadership after women librarians reported his persistent harassment, and in 2019 the association stripped his name from its highest professional medal.

Sent to University College London in 1924 to learn the trade he had just joined, Ranganathan found existing classifications rigid — every subject had to fit a pre-printed list. The insight arrived, he later recounted, in a London department store, watching a demonstration of a Meccano construction set: standard parts and connectors could build anything. His Colon Classification assembled a subject's number the same way, from facets — personality, matter, energy, space, time — joined by punctuation, letting the scheme express subjects its designers had never imagined.

In December 1908, not yet thirty, Greene pulled off the coup that made her name: with Lord Amherst's celebrated library headed to auction after his solicitor embezzled his fortune, she negotiated privately on the eve of the sale and secured sixteen books printed by William Caxton, England's first printer, for Morgan at a stroke — beating every rival collector without a single bid. Decades of such victories built the Morgan into a world collection; before her death she burned her personal papers, keeping her own story catalogued by no one.

Perón's government removed Borges from his library post in 1946 and "promoted" him to inspector of poultry and rabbits in the municipal markets; he resigned rather than accept the insult. Nine years later, with Perón deposed, Argentina named him director of the National Library — in the same months his hereditary blindness became complete. Borges noted the magnificent irony of being granted 800,000 books and darkness at once, observed that he was the library's third blind director, and ran it for eighteen years, resigning when Perón returned to power in 1973.

To encode a catalog card, Avram first had to discover what one actually was: she spent months dissecting cataloguers' practice field by field, translating a century of typographic convention — the significance of a comma, an indentation, a parenthesis — into tagged, subfielded, machine-readable structure. The MARC pilot began distributing electronic records to sixteen American libraries in 1966; the format became a US national standard in 1971 and an international one in 1973, and half a billion WorldCat records later, her design still underlies nearly every library search on Earth.