Margaret A. Edwards (nicknamed Alex by her friends) is considered the very first teen librarian, and her purview was the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore for about 30 years, beginning in 1932. In her time, she trained innumerable young adult librarians by making them read 200 novels and report back on them to her, 10 books at a time, in preparation for talking to teens about them. She book-talked in the public schools (unheard of in the 1930s), and rented a horse and wagon to bring books to neighborhoods that didn’t make regular use of “her” library. Edwards’ love of reading, and conviction that only through literature would young adults move beyond themselves into a larger world, became the hallmark of her professional life. Here is one of my favorite quotes from her, about the value of fiction, which in her time was disputed as not nearly so important as “informational” reading:

“Certainly we get essential information from factual books, but it is experience we need most.
If we would live richly, we can expand our lives more by sailing down the Nile with Cleopatra, looking at the cherry trees with Housman, or sweating it out to triumph at long last with Moss Hart than we can by gathering all available information on Egypt, raising cherries, or writing for the theater.”