While many people may not be familiar with who Helen Haines was, she made numerous contributions during her lifetime to the American Library Association, the library press, library education, and the American intellectual freedom movement.

The eldest of five daughters born in Brooklyn, New York, to Benjamin Reeve, a wool broker, and Mary Hodges Haines, a woman who was both strong willed and well read, Helen Haines did not receive a formal education. Instead, she was home-schooled by her mother. Haines read voraciously and by the age of nineteen had written her first work, History of New Mexico from the Spanish Conquest to the Present Time, 1530-1890, with Portraits and Bibliographical Sketches of Its Prominent People. This book marked the beginning of a lengthy writing career that included more than one hundred articles for publications such as Library Journal, Publishers' Weekly, Dial...