Does anybody know the story of how Melvil Dewey came up with his library classification system?

Question

I remember in elementary school - our librarian told us this crazy story about how he was obsessed with organizing books. Anyone heard or read anything like this?

Answer 1

I'm not sure there is an actualy story with a Eureka moment. He worked as an assistant librarian while a student at Amherst University and it was there that he developed his system. He probably was just an organized person who wanted needed some sort of organization to find a book quickly.

The system divides ALL knowledge into ten major classification systems and then brings those into subdivisions. The process has been updated and revised countless times since its inception so I'm not really sure what the original system looked like. FYI- Fiction is actually included in the decimal system in the 800s.