Subject Subdivisions: (A) Under Names of Countries, States, Etc., (B) Under Names of Cities, (C) Under General Subjects
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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Charles Martel was born on March 5, 1860 in Zurich, Switzerland; originally named Karl David Hanke, he was the son of Franz Hanke, an antiquarian bookseller, and Maria Gertrud (Strässle) Hanke. His father, a native of Gr(tm)bnig, Silesia (now Grobniki, Poland), had settled in Zurich about 1840; his mother was from the Swiss canton of St. Gall. With his older brother Franz Heinrich Hanke he visited the United States in 1876 and attended the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia. Little is known of the next decade of his life. About March 1879, after his father's death, he left Zurich, apparently because of family financial difficulties, and came to the United States. He reportedly farmed in the North Carolina highlands for a time; when his family last heard from him, in January 1881, he was at Louisville, Kentucky. On April 4, 1887, in the Dent County Circuit Court in Salem, Mo. (where according to one account he had been teaching school), he became a United States citizen, under the name Charles Martel.
Education
Karl studied at the local Gymnasium, 1872-76, spending spare hours immersed in his father's bookstore, more extensive than most libraries.
Career
In 1888 Martel settled in Iowa, where he was for some time an accountant and estate manager for a lawyer and real estate dealer in Council Bluffs. The circumstances that drew him into library work are not known. Having moved, apparently, to Chicago, he joined the staff of the Newberry Library there in March 1892. His unusual bibliographic knowledge and linguistic skills gradually brought him recognition. During his five years at the Newberry, he received valuable professional training from Dr. William F. Poole, the director, and others of his staff, including J. C. M. Hanson. Martel resigned in November 1897 to follow Hanson to the Library of Congress in Washington, as chief classifier. The Library had just opened to the public in its monumental new building, and its cataloguing staff, headed by the strong-fibered Hanson, faced overwhelming problems. Between 1897 and 1930 he usually had his office on the main floor east of the great reading room and the public catalogue. After Hanson left the Library of Congress in 1910, Martel directed the preparation and printing of the unit catalogue cards begun by Hanson; their distribution did much to assure the excellence of card catalogues in American libraries. After his wife's death in 1906, Martel centered his interests more and more in the Library of Congress. Late in 1912 he was appointed chief of the Library's catalogue division. To this post, which he held until 1930, he brought zeal and energy, combined with extremely wide bibliographical knowledge. Early in 1928, at the invitation of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Martel served with Hanson and William Warner Bishop on a commission to plan and begin a central card catalogue for the printed book collection of the Vatican Library. Martel, who spoke French and Italian perfectly, spent five months in Rome, where he contributed much toward the development of the Vatican Library catalogue rules. Martel reached the statutory retirement age of seventy in 1930. An executive order by President Hoover specially exempted him, however, as "one of the leading authorities (perhaps the leading authority) in the highly technical work of cataloguing and classification chiefly responsible for the development at the Library of Congress of the elaborate system of cataloguing, the results of which have been accepted by libraries generally as authoritative. " That September he became a consultant in cataloguing, classification, and bibliography. He continued to work as consultant until May 1, 1945. Two weeks later he died in Washington of a cerebral thrombosis, in his eighty-sixth year. His remains were cremated.
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Views
Martel devoted himself to constructing a modern, flexible system of book classification, capable of indefinite expansion, to apply to the vast collection that included almost every branch of learning, in both ancient and modern languages. The system then in use, originally devised by Thomas Jefferson, had already become a straitjacket. After surveying other existing systems of classification, Martel outlined a scheme which was approved in 1898. Books were assigned to main classes designated by capital letters, such as A for general works and polygraphy, J for political science, and Z for bibliography, while subclasses were expressed by numbers. Martel began the reclassification but had to suspend work for lack of staff until late in 1900, when, after Herbert Putnam had become Librarian of Congress, adequate funds were made available. Schedule E appeared in 1901, and during the next thirty years all the other schedules were completed save for K (Law), which was not developed until some years after his death. Work on the reclassification was slowed by other demands on Martel's time.
Personality
In person, Charles Martel was sturdily built, slightly below medium height, with a keenly analytical mind. Modest and self-effacing, he expressed himself precisely, usually with a tinge of humor, and wrote with copperplate regularity and clearness. With his vast knowledge of the collections, his command of languages, and his almost uncanny mastery of the card catalogue, as well as of bibliographies and reference works, Martel was often called upon to help solve difficult queries.
Connections
On March 16, 1900, at Baltimore, Maryland, Charles Martel married a widow, Emma (McCoy) Haas, of Woodstock, Va. They had one son, Renaud (Rennie).