Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Fame and the dead librarian

I found some surrealists, authors, alchemists and inventors to include in this distingushed list of [predominantly] dead, famous people who once worked as librarians :

  • Georges Bataille (Surrealist author)


  • Jorge Luis Borges (Argentinian novelist)


  • Laura Bush (ex-US President's wife...)

  • Lewis Carroll (novelist)

  • John Dee (Renaissance magician/alchemist)

  • Marcel Duchamp (influential artist and DADAIST)

  • Benjamin Franklin (American scientist, inventor, statesman, and philosopher)

  • Hypatia of Alexandria (Ancient Greek mathematician)

  • Lao Tsu (Chinese philosopher and reputed founder of Taoism - Court librarian)

  • Marcel Proust (French novelist, essayist and critic)


  • Phillip Pullman (fantasy author)

and the notorious Casanova, infamous for many reasons, was also a librarian...








3 comments:

plumpes Denken said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
plumpes Denken said...

Marcel Proust? Really? I think Mao Zedong was supposed to have been a librarian before the career change.

Gary

The Mirrored Librarian said...

Hi Gary,

thanks so much for your comment. Yes, I thought it was wonderful that Proust was once a librarian. I learnt when doing some research for my list that after graduating from the Sorbonne, he worked as a librarian and of course, also as a journalist.

And yes, I believe Mao Zedong was also a librarian, and also J. Edgar Hoover!! It really was an interesting exercise discovering these well known people and their former lives as librarians, and my list ultimately was personal choice, made up of the people I found, and I tried to make them unexpected or obscure, or at least interesting. Will have to do a second 'fame and the dead librarian - 2' at some stage...

Cheers,

Fawnia.