Today is "Dewey Decimal Day." My west coast brother shared this information with me and it made me curious. So here are some fun facts about the Dewey Decimal System. It was first presented in a 44 page pamphlet written by Melvil Dewey, an American librarian and educator, in 1876. He had been working on the system for three years prior to that. Before the DDS, books were arranged in libraries in order of acquisition. This did not make it easy to find what you were looking for. Mr. Dewey decided that there had to be a better way and he created it. Over the years, there have been 23 major revisions of the DDS, the latest being in 2011. So yes, it's still going strong. It's currently being used in 200,000 libraries in over 135 countries. If you haven't been to a library for a long time, you'll still find rows and rows of mostly non-fiction books shelved by their DDS numbers. What you won't find are card catalogs, those cabinets filled with little, but very deep, drawers full of cards listing the author, title, etc. of each book in the library, and where it could be found. It's all on computers now. As it should be. When I was in high school, decades ago, I loved to volunteer in the school library because it got me out of study hall. We had it all, the DDS, the card catalogs, the little stamps to stamp the due date on the card that fit in the pocket inside the front cover of the book. Come on, I know at least some of you remember those things. What our little small town high school library also had were some rather adult (to my innocent mind) novels. "A Town Like Alice" (my all time favorite book) and "Kristen Lavransdatter" come to mind. Wow, I just discovered, while Googling the spelling of Lavransdatter, that the book is available as an audio book now. Those we did not have way back then. As I recall, the book was at least 800 pages long, so prepare yourself for a long listen, but, if you have a long driving trip coming up it might be worth checking it out. Happy reading everybody.
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