Librarians need a seaside rest home!

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According to Livia Gershon’s article “Being a Victorian Librarian Was Oh-So-Dangerous,” Melvil Dewey “predicted that female librarians would have trouble doing the job because of poor health.” Indeed, at the turn of the last century the Brooklyn Public Library Association proposed a “seaside rest home” for broken-down librarians.

When Diane Westerfield forwarded this article to me, I responded that maybe Dewey had the idea that librarians might suffer from nervous exhaustion or whatever because he was sexually harassing them and perhaps there was some emotional fallout from that. Diane then found this hair-raising portrait of Dewey available at Find-A-Grave. The look in his eyes! Yike!