Marilyn Johnson Quote

I became interested in librarians while researching my first book, about obituaries. With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former soldier in Hitler's army who had a sex change and took up professional whistling, the most engaging obit subjects were librarians. An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her aging patrons read as children—and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Maine coast—or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress's map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps.

Marilyn Johnson

I became interested in librarians while researching my first book, about obituaries. With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former soldier in Hitler's army who had a sex change and took up professional whistling, the most engaging obit subjects were librarians. An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her aging patrons read as children—and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Maine coast—or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress's map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps.

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About Marilyn Johnson

Marilyn Kinsman Johnson (February 18, 1928 – October 31, 2007) was an American bridge player from Houston, Texas. She won three world championships, one at women pairs and two at women teams, all in partnership with Mary Jane Farell. Farell and Johnson also won the North American von Zedtwitz Life Master Pairs in 1978, which no other pair of women has done (1930 to 2014).
Johnson, a native of Rutland, Vermont, majored in chemistry at Wellesley College and worked 33 years for Shell Oil. She died in Houston, aged 79.