Verner W. Clapp

Verner Warren Clapp (June 3, 1901 – June 15, 1972) was a librarian, writer, and polymath. Starting as a summer clerk at the Library of Congress in 1922, Clapp rose to chief assistant librarian and acting Librarian of Congress. In 1956, he left the Library to serve as the first President of the Council on Library Resources. In these and other capacities, Clapp significantly contributed to administrative and technological modernization of the Library of Congress and to librarianship generally. Known to his peers as "Mr. Librarian", a "library giant" "the librarian's librarian", and, among other accolades, "the library world's Da Vinci" across his varied career Clapp earned tremendous professional and personal respect and many of the library industry's highest honors and awards. Librarian of Congress Lawrence Quincy Mumford said of Clapp, "His contributions to the Library of Congress and to the library world are so varied and numerous that one is staggered at the knowledge that a single person in his lifetime could accomplish this." Librarian of Princeton University, William S. Dix, said of Clapp, he was "close to the center of almost every important development in scholarly librarianship for at least 30 years". Clapp never formally trained in librarianship, having received an A.B. from Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut and studied graduate-level philosophy at Harvard University. Instead, he applied a practical mind and insatiable curiosity to problem solving, coordination and technological solutions. Clapp's professional focus and accomplishments include materials preservation, library cooperation, technology, including microfilm and computerization, copyright, fair use, Cataloging in Publication (CIP), inter-library networking and cooperation and user access. Clapp also played significant roles in the preservation of the Declaration of Independence and other foundational documents during World War II, post-War library acquisitions, and the creation of both the United Nations Library (now Dag Hammarskjöld Library) and the Japanese National Diet Library.

Early life Clapp was born in Johannesburg, South Africa (then "Transvaal") to an English mother, Mary Sybil Helms Clapp, and an American father, George Herbert Clapp. Mary Helms, daughter of Danish mining engineer Ludvig Verner Helms, was born in Sarawak in Borneo and educated in Europe and had moved to the Transvaal to work in a law office when she met George Clapp, an American entrepreneur from Dover, New Hampshire, who was in Johannesburg to sell bicycles. They were married in 1898. During the Second Boer War, Mary Clapp served as a British army nurse. In 1905 the family moved to the United States, settling in Poughkeepsie, New York, where George Clapp's brother ran a drug store. Clapp and his father took long hikes across the countryside and swam in the Hudson River, which led to Clapp's life-long passion for brisk, extended walks and the outdoors. Clapp credited a foundry across from his home for his fascination with machinery and mechanical processes, as the foundry workers entertained his questions and curiosity. Throughout his childhood Clapp was an avid reader who, he said, "finished most of Dickens, and Scott by the time I was fourteen", as well as Herodotus, given him by his mother for his fourteenth birthday and which he later read in Greek. From Poughkeepsie High School, Clapp attended Trinity College, graduating with an A.B. in 1922. Clapp was captain of the Trinity track team, member of Sigma Nu fraternity, joined the Student Army Training Corps in 1918 (see Reserve Officers' Training Corps) and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa in 1921. In 1922, he enrolled at Harvard University to study graduate-level philosophy, where he studied under Bertrand Russell. He additionally audited literature courses by John Livingston Lowes and Irving Babbitt, "to whom", Clapp recollected, "I suppose I am more indebted than I know. And of course, there is T.S. Eliot – and so many others."

Career at Library of Congress Clapp's 33-year span at the Library of Congress was described by a biographer as "a career of immense diversity and depth, a career not likely to be matched in today's age of specialization". Such rise in "specialization" came hand-in-hand with enormous technological change, making Clapp's entrance to librarianship, although unintended, propitious. Clapp scoffed at distinctions in the field between "the librarian as bookman and the librarian as retriever of information", as an interviewer queried of him in 1965, calling it: "sheer baloney". Educated in the liberal arts and philosophy, fascinated by books, gadgets, technology, and ideas—and untrained in librarianship, Clapp's contribution to what he called the "professional memory," was enormous, to which his peers would repeatedly attest, such as his entry in the Dictionary of American Library Biography: "His interests were so broad and his knowledge so extensive that one is baffled in trying to highlight his accomplishments." While promoting the study of librarianship for others, it was his overarching view of the field as a human and not just professional endeavor that yielded such a diverse and acclaimed career that started, quite literally, at the reference desk of the Library of Congress's Main Reading Room. At the 1956 dedication to the National Library of Canada, Clapp described his vision for libraries and, as such, his professional purpose: "Libraries are the repositories of man's tradition, and so, in a manner of speaking, of his collective soul."

Summer internship and career start During the summer of 1922, Clapp joined his parents, who had moved to Washington, D.C., and found temporary work at the Library of Congress as a cataloger in the Manuscript Division. There, Clapp filled in for another cataloger who, Clapp recalled, "usually turned out in a year somewhat less than a third of what I turned out that summer". Clapp cataloged collections relating to the American Revolution, the Civil War and the papers of Reverdy Johnson, whose "execrable penmanship", Clapp said, "was even worse than that of Horace Greeley, which was notably bad".

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