Authors librarians: Borges, Duchamp, Vlado Martek, Goethe and others.

Many famous philosophers, writers and scientists worked as librarians at some point in their lives (Eratosthenes, Benjamin Franklin, David Hume, Béla Hamvas and many others), and some of them made a significant contribution to the library profession (such as the philosopher, mathematician, philologist and historian Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz). There were a lot of interesting authors, and here we will present seven of them from the literary and artistic fields.

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798)

Casanova was a writer, translator, musician, diplomat, traveler, and dreamer. His character and adventurous life have been presented in several novels and films (see "Fellini's Casanova"). He wrote memoirs that are considered an authentic and valuable depiction of 18th-century society and are an important historical source. He began his work towards the end of his life, as a librarian to Count Waldstein in Bohemia, which was "the only remedy for preventing madness or dying of grief." It would be said that the aged Casanova was quite bored after his wanderings in a small town and in an isolated library, but this at least prompted him to write.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832)

During his lifetime in Weimar, Gothe held many important positions, and was active in the Council of State and the diplomatic service, he was the manager of the slate mine, the director of the theater and various other cultural institutions, and among other things, he became the director of the Ducal Library. He approached this work with the same zeal and as thoroughly as everyone else. He procured new shelves, set the working hours of librarians, supervised cataloguing, ordered the uprooting of the entire hedge that drew moisture into the library premises, arranged new rules for the lending and return of books, initiated the sale of duplicates and unnecessary materials through auctions, and supervised who used the keys to the library. An important task for him was to merge the Ducal Library and the library of the University of Jena. (See: Goethe as Librarian, Author(s): Christa Sammons, Source: The Yale University Library Gazette, July 1978, Vol. 53, No. 1, pp. 26-28, URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40858660) Goethe was a humanist of broad knowledge and was systematically educated throughout his life in various fields, so it is not surprising that he was also a dedicated librarian.