BROOKLYN COLLEGE LIBRARY ARCHIVES
AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
Accession Number #91-009
Biographical Note
ASA DON DICKINSON, (1876-1960), Brooklyn College’s first
Chief Librarian, was born in Detroit, Michigan, and
educated at the Brooklyn Latin School. In 1894, he became
a student at Columbia Law School, but left after two
years due to poor health. Thereafter he had thoughts
of becoming a librarian, particularly after he heard
that Andrew Carnegie, the philanthropist who established
over 2,500 public libraries, was about to fund some
additional ones in New York City. He enrolled at the
New York State Library School in Albany, and also began
to compile a list of the books he believed to be most
noteworthy. Thus began his lifelong bibliographic hobby
that resulted in Mr. Dickinson’s “best books”
series.
Dickinson’s first position was at the Montague
Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. This is where
he soon took the initiative to organize a department
for the blind, something that had not been attempted
before in a public library. In fact, Mr. Dickinson made
such a good case for the blind at a meeting of the American
Library Association in 1906 that he was soon installed
as chairman of the newly formed Committee on Service
to the Blind.
Mr. Dickinson held many different positions at public
libraries and in academic universities. He worked at
the Brooklyn Public Library, in Brooklyn, New York;
at the Union College Library in Schenectady, New York;
Leavenworth (Kansas) Free Public Library; Washington
State College Library, in Pullman, Washington; at the
University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia; at the Brooklyn
College Library in Brooklyn, New York; and at the University
of Punjab in Lahore, India.
In 1912, a friend, Russell Doubleday, asked Dickinson
to join Doubleday, Page and Company as an editor. He
agreed. Dickinson edited historical books, biographies,
and anthologies, primarily for young adults. He was
the author or editor of such popular books like Booth
Tarkington, Children’s Book of Christmas Stories,
Europe at War, The Kaiser, Wild
Flowers, and The Doubleday
Encyclopedia. While taking a year off in 1916 to go
to India, Dickinson continued to compile his “best
books’ series” such as One Thousand Best
Books and the Best Books of Our Times.
In 1915, Asa Don Dickinson took a year off and traveled
to India to teach at the University of the Punjab in
Lahore. Although his pupils were most attentive, even
during the long three- to four-hour classes, there were
no textbooks and most of what was discussed in class
was memorized. Surprisingly, many of his students had
the ability and the aptitude to repeat, nearly verbatim,
entire pages of text. Dickinson’s “souvenir
of a great adventure,” his Panjab Library
Primer,
was written in 1916 especially for the students that
he taught at Punjab University. He wrote this small
primer during a short three-week stay in Gulmarg, a
remote area of the Himalayas. Even today in India and
in Pakistan, Mr. Dickinson’s Panjab Library Primer
is still considered important during the development
and modernization of the Indian library system.
From 1931-1944, Asa Don Dickinson was Brooklyn College’s
Chief Librarian. He helped design the library building
and admitted he was exacting in the particulars; lighting
fixtures were designed “specifically for each
individual room to provide the proper illumination,”
the building itself was “economically furnished
for students’ needs without any wood carvings,
lounges, or tapestries on the walls … it was not
to be viewed as a country club.” From the lighting
fixtures to the steel cabinets housing library card
catalogs, from the glass-topped tables to the seven
tiers of stacks, Dickinson saw the library “…
as the very essence of the college itself, the very heart of the university.”
Dickinson built the library collection to 90,000, with an annual circulation of 600,000. In one of his letters to the college president, Dickinson complained about the possibility of building a new high school next to the library because “ … it would impede the possibility of a library expansion … no college can become great while its library remains small.”
The “Dickinson Room” at the Brooklyn College Library was established in his honor to house the library’s archives and distinctive special collections.
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