Librarians

 As a former librarian, I am always keen to learn of writers, artists and musicians vastly more illustrious than me who also worked as librarians at some point in their lives. So far, my list includes Proust (who took a job as a volunteer librarian, to please his father, but hardly ever turned up for work), Marcel Duchamp (who worked briefly as a librarian, to free his mind for other things), Borges of course (director of the National Library of Argentina for 18 years), Marianne Moore (library assistant at the New York Public Library's Hudson Park branch during the 1920s), Hector Berlioz (librarian at the Paris Conservatoire), Philip Larkin of course (university librarian at Hull), Anne Tyler (assistant librarian at McGill University Law School) and Angus Wilson (British Museum Library, as it then was, before and after the war). Has anybody got any more names to add to the list?
   And then, of course, there is Keith Richards, bibliophile extraordinaire, who spent many happy boyhood hours in Dartford public library, was fascinated by the Dewey decimal system, and might well have been a librarian if his career hadn't taken a somewhat different path. In 1998 he suffered the least rock'n'roll accident that ever befell a rock god, when he fell off his library steps while reaching for a book, breaking three ribs and puncturing a lung. You can read about it here (and follow the link, if you can, to one of the most curious books in my own library).