Mempo Giardinelli: The Library in the Life of a Writer

"We are, strictly speaking, what we have read."--Mempo Giardinelli, 2004.

I'd like to add Mempo Giardinelli's list of librarians to those I was thinking about last week. Some of the librarians he identified at the World Library and Information Congress in 2004:

• Achille Ratti, librarian at the Milan’s Ambrosian Library and prefect at the Vatican’s Apostolic library, who became Pope Pius XI;
• the philosopher George Berkeley, librarian at Dublin’s Trinity College;
• the Chinese leader Mao Tsé–Tung was assistant at the Pekin Library;
• writer and polygrapher Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo directed the National Library of Spain.

Mempo Giardinelli's presentation, The Library in the Life of a Writer,
is beautiful, the kind of statement that makes librarianship a clear path.
[Also available in the IFLA Journal 30 (2004): 288-292.]