An educational reformer and librarian, Melvil Dewey was born in Adams Centre, New York, on December 10, 1851 (a "decimal" date, he later boasted to friends), the fifth and last child of Joel and Eliza Greene Dewey. He attended rural local schools and early in life determined that his "des-tiny" was to become a "reformer" in educating the masses. In September 1870, he enrolled in Amherst College in Massachusetts.

In 1872, Dewey began working in the college library. There he discovered a site for his reforming interests, which by that time had also extended to simplified spelling, use of shorthand, and metric conversion. After he graduated in 1874, Amherst College hired Dewey to manage the library and reclassify the collections. For two years Dewey worked out a new scheme that superimposed a system of decimals on a structure of knowledge first outlined by Sir Francis Bacon and later modified...