Charles Evans: the benefits of a ninth-grade education

June 11, 2007 9:30 AM

Charles Evans (1850-1935) is one of the great unsung American librarians. He was an orphan; at fifteen, he dropped out of the Boston Asylum and Farm School for Indigent Boys. He became head of the Indianapolis Public Library at age 22, and at 25 became the first treasurer of the American Library Association. Then, his career took a nosedive: thanks to his intractable and independent nature, he was fired from 5 library positions, one after another. At 51, he found himself out of a job, with a family, with nowhere to work. Undaunted, he conceived a grand project: to singlehandedly catalogue every single book and pamphlet published in America between 1639 and 1800. The partially self-published result, Evans' American Bibliography, transformed the historical profession--though Evans died while cataloguing 1799, others have carried on his work. Volumes 1-8 are available at the Internet Archive, and a full-text searchable database of almost all of the pamphlets he catalogued can be found here _{(access restricted)}.
posted by nasreddin (4 comments total)

Is there a 'sung' American librarian? Dewey?
posted by spicynuts at 9:42 AM on June 11, 2007

It's library day on metafilter!
posted by Hildegarde at 9:57 AM on June 11, 2007

You know JSTOR and Questia are also both subscription services right?

The Questia link provides the following from the Columbia Encylopedia:

---American librarian and bibliographer, b. Boston. He organized many major American libraries including the Indianapolis public library, the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, and the Omaha public library. He also classified the Newberry Library in Chicago. An authority on American literature, Evans published American Bibliography (1903U+201355), a chronological directory of all material published in the United States from 1639 to 1820.---

Otherwise, it has a bibliography of material I can't view without subscription.

I'd be presuming that gathering info on this guy would be difficult but subscription/amazon takes over the bulk of the links. And 18Mb for Vol. 1 of the Am. bibliography at Archive.org is a hard sell.

I'm not going to flag this post however. Many of my favourite fantasies in life have involved librarians. But they were wearing dresses and didn't require a subscription.
posted by peacay at 10:17 AM on June 11, 2007

I apologize for the profusion of subscription links. The only mitigating factor I can cite is that he is old and obscure, so it's difficult to find free online resources.
posted by nasreddin at 10:24 AM on June 11, 2007