He began life as Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey, but soon .dropped the two middle names and shortened the first to Melvil. For a while he even tried to spell his surname “Dui.” He felt that, like most things in the world, his full name was a disorderly waste of time; and he devoted his life to setting things in order and saving time.

Melvil Dewey was born in upstate New York in 1851. His niece says that as a child “it was his delight to arrange his mother’s pantry, systematizing and classifying its contents. ” His reformer’s zeal was fully developed by the time he was fifteen, when he badgered his father into dropping from the stock of his tiny store that notorious thief of time, tobacco. His father acceded, the store failed, but Dewey rejoiced in being “morally ryt.”

On his eighteenth birthday he was already fretting over lost time. He had, he wrote, “accomplished during those eighteen years what I hope my children … will accomplish better in fifteen or less. … As far as education or discipline and development of the mind are concerned I am very sure fourteen years might accomplish it all.” He carried this interest in education with him into Amherst college, and in his annual character summary for his twenty-first birthday he announced “—my World Work—Free Schools & Free Libraries for every soul .”

As he studied the libraries nearby, he became increasingly distressed. They were citadels of disorder, with books classified by size, title, or name of author, by accession date, sometimes even by color. All that duplication of work from library to library, all that wasted time. “For months I dreamed night and day that there must be somewhere a satisfactory solution.” It came to him suddenly one Sunday while he was sitting through a “long sermon” without hearing a word. “I jumpt in my seat and came very near shouting ‘Eureka’! It was to get absolute simplicity by using the simplest known symbols, the arabic numerals as decimals with the ordinary significance of nought, to number a classification of all human knowledge in print.” After graduating in 1874, he continued to work in the Amherst library, perfecting his system. In 1876, at the age of twenty-four, he published the first of nineteen editions of A Classification Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library.

That same year he became a founder of the American Library Association. As its first secretary, he had the opportunity to promote his system. This he did relentlessly, and he continued to spread the word when, in 1883, he became librarian of Columbia College in New York. He immediately started reclassifying the college collections, established the first library school in America, and defended his stand with fierce eloquence when the administration got mad at him for admitting women.

With the school under way,