Melvil Dewey

Melville Louis Kossuth “Melville” Dewey (December 10, 1851 - December 26, 1931) was an American librarian and enlightener, inventor of the Dewey Decimal Classification System for Libraries, and founder of the Lake Placid Club. Dewey was born at the Adams Center, New York, the fifth and last child of Joel and Eliza Green Dewey. He attended rural schools and determined early that his fate was to reform the education of the masses. He studied briefly at Alfred University (1870), then at Amherst College, where he belonged to the Kappa Epsilon Delta, and in which he received a bachelor's degree in 1874 and a master's degree in 1877. While still a student, he founded a library bureau that sold high-quality registration cards and file cabinets, and set standard sizes for catalog cards. In his youth, he advocated spelling reform; he changed his name from the usual “Melville” to “Melville”, without extra letters, and for some time changed his last name to “Dui”. From 1883 to 1888 he was the chief librarian at Columbia University. During his work as director of the State Library of New York (1888–1906), Dewey created a program of traveling libraries. From 1888 to 1900, Dewey served as Secretary and Executive Director of the University of New York. In 1895, Dewey and his wife Annie founded the Lake Placid Club. He and his son Godfrey actively participated in organizing the Winter Olympic Games in Lake Placid - he led the New York State Winter Olympics Committee. In 1926, he traveled to Florida to establish a new branch of the Lake Placid Club. Dewey married twice, first to Annie R. Godfrey, and then to Emily Mackay Beale. He and his first wife had one child, Godfrey. Dewey became a member of the American Library Association Hall of Fame in 1951. He died of a stroke in Lake Placid, Florida.