Edmund Pearson
| Edmund Pearson | |
|---|---|
| Born |
February 11, 1880 Newburyport, Massachusetts |
| Died | August 8, 1937 (aged 57) New York City |
| Occupation | Librarian, Writer |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | B.A., B.L.S. |
| Alma mater | Harvard College, New York Library School at Albany |
| Period | 1906–1937 |
| Genre | True crime, Humor |
| Spouse | Mary Jane Sellers |
| Children | none |
Edmund Lester Pearson (1880–1937) was an American librarian and author. He was a writer of the "true crime" literary genre. He is best known for his account of the notorious Lizzie Borden murder case.
Pearson was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on February 11, 1880. He graduated from Harvard College in 1902. His first publication was in a school periodical, The Harvard Advocate. In 1904, he graduated with a B.L.S. from the New York State Library School at Albany, a forerunner of the Columbia School of Library Service. His thesis was a bibliography of Theodore Roosevelt.
After graduation he first worked as a librarian at the Washington D.C. Public Library, where he met his wife, then Miss Mary Jane Sellers. They did not have any children. In 1906 he moved to the Library of Congress as an assistant in the Copyright Division. In 1908 he became the acting librarian of the Military Information Division of the War Department. From 1906 to 1920 he wrote a weekly column, "The Librarian", for the newspaper the Boston Evening Transcript. The column consisted of humorous essays and stories. The stories often featured the fictional Ezra Beesly Free Public Library of the town of Baxter, as well as other fictional persons and places. In a column from 1907, Pearson printed a paragraph supposedly from an old librarian's almanac. Response from colleagues and friends lead him to expand it to a 34-page pamphlet that was published in 1909 as The Old Librarian's Almanack. On the title page the Almanack is described as "a very rare pamphlet first published in New Haven Connecticut in 1773 and now reprinted for the first time." The pamphlet was reviewed seriously by The New York Sun, The Nation, The New York Times, and several other publications, before the hoax was generally known. In 1927 the magazine Public Libraries called the hoax "a good piece of foolery, bright, clever, with the verisimilitude of authenticity." Even today, a humorous faux-medieval Curse Against Book Stealers from the pamphlet continues to be portrayed as real.
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