Background
He was the son of Charles P. and Mary (Ewing) Evans. His father was a seafaring man of Irish descent.
He was the son of Charles P. and Mary (Ewing) Evans. His father was a seafaring man of Irish descent.
Both his parents died before he was ten years old and he was placed in the Boston Farm and Trade School.
Fortunately for him, he came under the notice of Dr. Samuel Eliot, historian, educator, and philanthropist, who was appointed his guardian and in 1866 secured for him a position in the Boston Athenaeum. Here he remained for six years, being assigned increasingly responsible duties, becoming acquainted with books and library management, and acquiring a special interest in early American printing.
Apparently his parents had given him the middle name Theodore, since that name appears in the guardianship papers, but after leaving the Athenaeum in 1872 he never used it.
That year he became the organizer and librarian of the Indianapolis Public Library. For the next thirty years he was connected with various libraries--organizer and assistant librarian of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore in 1884, organizer of the Omaha Public Library in 1887, librarian of the Indianapolis Public Library in 1889, classifier of the collections of the Newberry Library in Chicago in 1892, organizer of the Virginia Library of the McCormick Theological Seminary of Chicago in 1895, and librarian of the Chicago Historical Society from 1896 to 1901.
In 1901 he began serious work on this undertaking, a project so great and so exacting in its demands that only one of courage and capacity for painstaking, self-denying labor would have ventured upon it.
It was one, however, for which by experience and character he was well fitted. In 1903 the financial assistance of three friends in Indianapolis made publication of the first volume possible. Evans was by no means content to furnish the text and leave the details of printing and format to others.
He familiarized himself with all the details involved in publication; paper, type, and binding were of his own choosing; and there was nothing connected with the volume which he did not oversee personally. Successive volumes followed, generally at intervals of two years.
By 1914 he had finished the eighth, which completed the record of printing through 1792. Conditions brought about by the First World War made it financially impossible to publish more volumes for eleven years, but in 1925, through activities initiated by the American Library Association, the ninth appeared and in 1929, the tenth. Subsequently, grants from the American Council of Learned Societies enabled Evans to issue two more volumes in 1931 and 1934.
He was working on what was to be the final one when death overtook him. This volume would have continued the record to 1800--Evans had abandoned his too ambitious plan to bring it down to 1820--and it is anticipated that it will be completed finally by the American Antiquarian Society, which inherited his literary material.
Evans's complete absorption in the task he had set himself and his patient, self-sacrificing labors over many years enabled him to put at the disposal of scholars and investigators one of the most valuable works of reference ever produced. It was peculiarly his own achievement.
He had practically no assistance in assembling his material; he examined countless sources; prepared the manuscripts in his own handwriting; personally oversaw every detail of printing; read the proof himself; and made the indexes.
His own death was occasioned by a cerebral hemorrhage.
Quotations: He is quoted as saying that he had lived so long with the books of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that men of today were "more a myth to him than those of the first 200 years of this country" (Chicago Daily News, August 16, 1934).
He was a member of the American Library Association.
Evans was a man of simple tastes, naturally shy, and too occupied with his great undertaking to have many social activities even if he had cared for them.
On April 8, 1883, he married Lena Young of Fort Worth, Texas, who died in 1933. He was survived by three children, Gertrude, Eliot, and Charles, popularly known as "Chick, " gold champion and sports writer. A fourth child, Constance, died in infancy.
