Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library

Author Carole Boston Weatherford serves up a reverential look at the life of historian and bibliographer Arturo Schomburg (1874-1938) in this iconographic-animated adaptation of the titular 2017 picture book, featuring illustrations by Eric Velasquez. Gorgeous realistic oils depict scenes of Afro-Puerto Rican Schomburg, who even in fifth grade questioned a teacher who said that Africans had no history of note. Digging deeper for his own curiosity, Arturo had more access to knowledge at the tip of his fingers after immigrating to NYC as a 17-year-old, and while working as a law clerk he also became an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance. His appreciation of Africana and "book-hunting disease" found Arturo poring over rare and lost books, art, and artifacts, discovering little-known African American history about Benjamin Banneker, Phillis Wheatley, the Amistead uprisings, and the African roots of luminaries including John James Audubon, Alexandre Dumas, Alexander Pushkin, and Beethoven. Also touching on Schomburg’s family life (he married three women named Elizabeth) and future as a renowned curator whose collections were made accessible to the public (including his own research library branch of the NYPL), this biographical profile read by Ron Butler also notes that Schomburg once fired a librarian for using the Dewey decimal system instead of his own methodology (ouch). Recommended. Aud: E, I, P. (J. Williams-Wood)