Day, the Fourteenth

Your Face is a Book

And today, Nov. 14, 2022, marks the date – 290 years ago today - that the first professional librarian was hired in America.

His name was Louis Timothee, a 33-year-old Netherlands-born printer working at the time under the employ of none other than Ben Franklin. His term? Three months. The library? The Library Company of Philadelphia, of course.

A lot of folks think America’s first librarian was Ben himself, but nope!

An aside - The Library Company of Philadelphia today houses one of the most significant collections of historical value in the world. Among its nearly 600,000 items: 20,000 original documents belonging to Franklin, The Mayflower Compact and first editions of “Moby Dick” and “Leaves of Grass.”

At left, the original Library Company of Philadelphia. At right, a page from Louis Timothee’s South Carolina Gazette.

I feel something of a kinship with Louis mainly because he, also, appears to have been an accidental librarian. His original plan upon arriving in British America was to teach French, but he had some printing skills, learned from his father, and it didn’t take him long – one month after arriving actually – to run into the most famous printer in Philadelphia. Franklin hired him as a printer for his Philadelphia Gazette, but a couple months later, hired him as a librarian for seven hours a week for a total of 3 sterling over the course of three months.

Louis focused, like Franklin, on positive living – ways to be a better man, thriftiness, gardening, virtue, pretty standard Franklin themes. Eventually, he headed down to South Carolina, opened the South Carolina Gazette and promptly died of Yellow Fever at 39.

These little historical asterisks always strike my fancy, small blurbs in the slip stream. Would we even know the name Louis Timothee if he hadn’t been a librarian for 90 days?

First director, Frances Griffin, above, and your current humble servant - a century and two decades between us!

Making an impact is often not about grand gestures or world-wide fame (though it is that too, but few of us ever get that chance). But maybe my tenure as director at my small rural library – as much as I seem to have stumbled upon the opportunity – can have meaning as well. The thing is, you just don’t know what little kid will have a core memory created, or what patron can find exactly the right piece of information to change their life, or how the fellowship of the library can develop connection in somebody’s life. Information, free and open, can do that.

Even without a first edition of “Leaves of Grass,” the possibilities are infinite.

I’m glad somebody like Louis was the first – an unknown, outside his comfort zone, just trying to make a living in a new country when he said yes to a surprise opportunity.

We’re always walking in somebody’s footsteps, and somebody is eventually going to walk in ours.