George Herbert Putnam was born on September 20, 1861, in New York City, New York, to George and Victorine Putnam. His father was a prominent writer and publisher who owned $45,000 of real estate and $2,000 of personal property by 1870. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1883, and he briefly attended Columbia Law School.

 

He married Charlotte Munroe on October 5, 1886, and they had two children: Shirley, born around 1888; and Brenda, born around on June 3, 1890. In 1887, he became the librarian of the Minneapolis Athenaeum, which became the Minneapolis Public Library the following year. While he was there, he developed the Putnam Classification System, which later influenced the Library of Congress’s classification system. According to an early biographer, he “modernized antiquated methods, revised the charging records of books on loan, inaugurated a new system of cataloging and classification, [and] opened the alcoves to readers.”

 

He moved to Boston, Massachusetts, in the early 1890s to help care for his mother-in-law, and he worked as a lawyer for the next few years. In February 1895, he became the librarian of the Boston Public Library. He became the Librarian of Congress in 1899, and he held the position for the next forty years. He retired in October 1939. He died of a coronary thrombosis in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, on August 14, 1955.

 

Image: George H. Putnam (courtesy Wikicommons)

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