Word: putnam
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...century later only the Librarian himself knew how to find the one million ill-catalogued books, and accounts were short $30,000 because a stack of uncashed money orders had been temporarily lost in the piles. That was when President McKinley picked a scholarly lawyer-librarian named Herbert Putnam to straighten things out. This week, eight Presidents later, Librarian Emeritus Putnam at 85 still showed up every day at the office, though first Archibald MacLeish (in 1939) and then Evans (in 1945) had taken over the main...
...Before Putnam, the library was not interested in lending books; it preserved them for posterity. Putnam had a different idea: "We are ourselves a posterity." He began a system of lending books to other libraries, made the public welcome. Last year 669,740 readers used the library's 20 reading rooms, and 764 scholars researched and wrote books in its cubicles. A "faculty" of 25 fellows and 22 consultants (among them: Poet Karl Shapiro) constantly survey and "interpret" the library collections, tell the Librarian what to get and what to throw away, help visiting scholars. The library...
...stenographic, Pullman-smoker school of writing"-visited Montparnasse and sat himself down at a conspicuous table in one of the cafés, every expatriate eye turned icily away. "Little" magazines such as transition, Broom, Secession, and Gargoyle occupied a position of huge magnitude in the expatriate eye. Putnam tells the dismal tale of Abraham Lincoln Gillespie's wife, whom Putnam found one day close to tears. "Line and I," she explained sadly, "are separating. . . . He's made transition [and he] says I'm not his intellectual equal any more...
...week the expatriate might listen to Henry (Tropic of Cancer) Miller expounding in four-letter words his philosophy of life-the essence of which, Author Putnam says, "was to the effect that prostitutes are about the only pure beings to be found in a world of reeking garbage." There was also frustrated Author Leo Stein, whose loathing of his prolific sister, Gertrude, was a feature of the boulevards. "My God, Sam!" Leo would groan to Author Putnam, "You have no idea how dumb she is! Why, when we were in school, I used to have to do all her homework...
...experience of 'exile' worthwhile?" asks Author Putnam. "To us? To America?" Being an ex-expatriate himself, the question is simply rhetorical; the answer is yes. "Who today can doubt," he concludes, "which it was . . . the 'exiles' or the stay-at-homes who contributed most in the way of positive direction to American letters. . . ?" Stay-at-home readers may find his answer, like his question, rhetorical-or plain silly...