From ancient times, libraries have served as keepers of knowledge, helping people with information that they needed to learn or do certain tasks. But do you know some of the great minds, from award-winning authors to the inventor of calculus served as librarians? Here is a list of some such famous people you might not know about.
Beverly Cleary
Cleary is one of America’s most successful authors of children and young adult fiction selling more than 91 million copies of her books worldwide. Some of Beverly Cleary’s best-known characters are Ramona Quimby and Beezus Quimby, Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy, and Ralph S. Mouse. But do you know that before becoming a full-time kids’ book author, Beverly Cleary worked as a children’s librarian in Yakima, WA? She was also a post librarian at the US Army Hospital serving for 5 years.
Audre Lorde
Lorde was an American writer, feminist, womanist, and civil rights, activist. As a poet, she largely covered issues related to civil rights, feminism, illness, and disability. This legendary thinker and activist also trained as a librarian in the early 1960s and worked at Mount Vernon Public Library and Town School Library in New York City.
Lewis Carroll
An English author, poet, and mathematician, Lewis Carroll’s most celebrated work includes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Jabberwocky (1871), and The Hunting of the Snark (1876). He also worked at Oxford University’s Christ Church Library, which still has several of his manuscripts even today.
Jorge Luis Borges
Borges was a key figure in Spanish-language and international literaturewho wrote short stories, essays, and poems. His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph) were a compilation of short stories. The renowned author worked as a librarian and also served as director of the National Library of Argentina.
David Hume
Hume was an18th-century English philosopher, historian, economist,and essayist’. He was known for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. It would surprise you that David Hume also worked as a librarian at the Edinburgh Faculty of Advocates. He used this library’s resources to pen his six-volume bestseller, The History of England.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
As a philosopher, Leibniz was one of the ultimate representatives of 17th-century rationalism and idealism. And as a mathematician, his greatest accomplishment was the advancement of the main ideas of differential and integral calculus. In the field of library, he worked as an overseer of the Wolfenbüttel library in Germany and invented a cataloging system that served as a guide to many of Europe's leading libraries.
