Famous? From Adams Center?

Each weekday, I try to listen to a five-minute radio broadcast called Writer's Almanac. Host Garrison Keillor reads entries from a daily almanac of birthdays or events from the literary world, then a poem.

Today's broadcast "caught my ear." Did he really say Adams Center, New York?

I pulled up the website and sure enough, today is the birthday of someone born in that little village in upstate New York, the home of a Seventh Day Baptist church since 1822. And there's a good chance that Melvil Dewey, developer of the Dewey Decimal System, knew about that church. Here's the entry about Dewey from today's Writer's Almanac:


It's the birthday of Melvil Dewey, born in Adams Center, New York (1851). He went to Amherst, and to support himself there he worked in the college library, and he decided that it needed to be reorganized. At the time, there was no consistent method that libraries used to organize books. Some numbered shelves, some arranged books by size just to look nice, and some libraries tried to alphabetize the whole library, which meant that every time they got a new book they had to redo the entire system. Dewey saw a better way to do this, but for awhile, he couldn't decide whether to be a missionary or to put his time into reorganizing the library system. But he chose the latter, and he started to figure out a system of categories and subcategories, based on older ideas. As he researched, he wrote in his diary, "My heart is open to anything that's either decimal or about libraries."

And he came up with the Dewey Decimal System, which is still used today in many libraries, a series of classifications divided and subdivided into subjects and assigned a decimal number to each book.