“Nobody loved the library more than Dan”
“Memorial donations may be made to…the charity of one’s choice.” “In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to____.” “In memory of_____, please give a donation to, or volunteer some time at…a charity….”
There are only five obituaries in the Edmonton Journal on the day this is written, and three of them end with a common enough invitation, meant for those who cared, to do something in memory of the departed—making a charitable gift is a popular encouragement.
Dan Pelzer’s family urged otherwise: in his honour, folks were coaxed to read “a real page-turner.”
How fitting! You see, “Nobody loved the library more than Dan.” That was what his daughter Marci Pelzer declared in a jotting to the Columbus [Ohio] Metropolitan Library. Included with her note was Dan’s 109-page handwritten log of every single book he finished reading over more than 60 years—from 1962 to 2023. They numbered 3,599. [Do you see why Dan’s story would grab your librarians’ attention, and admiration?]
The late Dan Pelzer—he, at the age of 92, died on July 1—began his observance [obsession, some might say] in 1962. It was the year he spent “making his way through the library of [about 150] paperbacks set aside for Peace Corps volunteers in Nepal,” The Smithsonian’s correspondent Ella Feldman reported in a July 31 posting from the venerable institution.
There are words for folks like Dan: certainly, he was a bibliophile [an ardent reader; a bookworm], but also a bibliographer [a person who compiles bibliographies]. “Dan Pelzer’s nose was always in a book,” CBS Radio reported; he “made it his personal goal to read at least 100 pages every day…. […] And if someone recommended a book to him, he would read it.”
He’d “read on the bus, and everywhere he went,” his daughter mentions. “He always had a book open, a book in his hand. And it stimulated great conversations with all kinds of people.” What’s more, he passed on to family his passion: “When we were little,” his daughter remembers, “he took us to the downtown library every Saturday morning, and enrolled us in every summer reading program.”
She told CBS that Dan’s log “was just a list of the books he read that he kept personally so he could remember and think about them.” But the list’s reach has extended beyond her father’s friends and family, “and is inspiring others to read, think, and talk about books.” Reading widely, she concluded, would “make us more tolerant of one another.” And that, Dan would have loved, she’s sure. [To honour his legacy, his family has posted the entire list online at what-dan-read.com: click on the cover photo, and the many pages will open.]
Said to have been a lifelong liberal, Dan, a Marine Corps veteran, was a social worker at a juvenile correctional facility for 30 years. “Endlessly curious,” his obituary affirms, “he ran for political office, completed coursework toward a doctorate, and was a Jesuit seminarian,” albeit for just eight months—he was a devout Catholic.
Widowed last year after 52 years of marriage, Dan had to break off his page-turning routine when, in 2023, his eyesight deteriorated. But he left off on a high note: “The last book on Pelzer’s list was a classic,” Ms. Feldman reports: it was Charles Dicken’s David Copperfield. “But the avid reader kept up with contemporary fiction, too. His penultimate book was Gabrielle Zevin’s 2022 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a novel about a pair of video game designers.”
Mind you, as early as 2006 the Columbus Dispatch was on to him: “He had recently read James Joyce’s Ulysses, and he wasn’t afraid to tell…what he really thought. ‘The worst,’ he said. ‘Pure torture.’ Still, Pelzer finished reading the nearly-1,000-page classic,” Ms. Feldman adds, “because he finished reading every book he started. ‘Even the books that were dogs,’ wrote the Columbus Dispatch, ‘he would slog through to the final page.’”
Still, even at 3,599, his l-o-n-g list doesn’t include the books he read prior to his 1960’s stint with the Peace Corps: People reckons that he actually “read more than 5,000 books throughout the course of his life.” Nor does it include the Bible, which he read, it’s reported, perhaps a dozen times, though it does feature any of a number of books about religion.
And, speaking of books about religion, there are about 800 of them packing the shelves in our Southminster-Steinhauer United Church Library. Had Dan Pelzer been a member here, and if he’d have visited our book room as often as he did the public library in Columbus, and if he had read 80 of our books a year—which was his wont—he’d have closed the cover of the last of them in a mere decade. Why not see if you can do it in less?
—Ken Fredrick