author
Addison Van Name
A longtime Yale librarian and gifted linguist, he helped transform the university’s library into a major scholarly collection. His work bridged books and language study, with a special interest in Arabic and other Eastern languages.
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About the author
Born in Chenango County, New York, in 1835, Addison Van Name graduated from Yale in 1858 as class valedictorian. He went on to build a career as both a philologist and a librarian, combining a deep interest in languages with a life spent in scholarship and academic service.
Van Name is best known for his decades at Yale, where he served as University Librarian from 1865 to 1904 and later became librarian emeritus. During his long tenure, Yale’s holdings grew dramatically, and he became an important figure in shaping the library’s development as a serious research collection.
He also taught and wrote in the field of philology, especially in Arabic and related languages, and was associated with Yale as a professor as well as a librarian. He died in 1922, remembered as a careful scholar and one of the key builders of Yale’s library in the late nineteenth century.