Biography
I grew up on Chicago’s North Shore, went to Princeton, left after two years to enlist in the US Army. Sent to Europe despite the ongoing Vietnam War, I was taught German at the NATO School in Oberammergau and worked then as battalion interpreter for a signal unit outside Frankfurt. After my discharge from the military, I bought a bicycle and traveled through Western and Eastern Europe, much of the latter then still under Soviet domination. I returned to Germany and enrolled at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, graduating with an M.A. in linguistics and European history—my thesis was on a topic in speech act theory and linguistic pragmatics. For the following five years, I worked as a language specialist at a research library in Schloss Blutenburg, a moat-encircled 15th-century hunting castle outside Munich. I returned to the U.S. to get my library degree at UC Berkeley, where I graduated as a Regents Fellow. After a stint at Purdue, I came to Northwestern in 1995 as humanities bibliographer. After a few years I became an administrator, retiring in 2014 as associate university librarian for special libraries. Principal areas of research over the years have been international children’s literature, cognitive aspects of library use, and—a special interest—the secularization of monastery libraries in Germany and Austria in the 18th and early 19th centuries. On the latter topic, I was invited to give the overview lecture at an international conference at Oxford University in 2012—a high point of my career. Another was a talk I gave at a conference in Germany on the “cognitive economy of forgetting,” based on a book by my mentor at the University of Munich, the Romanist Harald Weinrich. The only other American invited to speak was Harvard librarian Robert Darnton. Now, as a retired academic librarian, I do consulting work for the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago, most recently on the state of web archiving with relevance to Latin American studies. I also work as a reference librarian for Evanston Public Library. I live in Chicago with my wife, Nina, with whom I opened an independent bookstore, Bookends & Beginnings, in 2014. Both of my children went to Northwestern—as did, for that matter, both of my parents. My blood flows purple.