Affairs of State
By Burton Egbert Stevenson
“Those fellows at the office are assuming altogether too much responsibility,” he muttered savagely as he wandered into the smoking room. “I told them I didn’t want to be bothered with little things, but I certainly expected to hear from them occasionally. If I don’t look out, they’ll reduce me to the status of a rubber stamp! I’ll have to stir them up,” and he gloomily extracted from the rack the newly-arrived, two-days-old London paper, brought by the little rickety train which struggled through at uncertain and infrequent intervals from Zunderburg to Weet-sur-Mer, lighted a fresh cigar, and sat down to a perusal of the news.
He proceeded in the most leisurely manner, for he knew that he had plenty of time. Indeed, the paper once finished, the remainder of the day would stretch before him an empty wilderness—a waste as monotonous and bare as the beach he had grown so weary of gazing at. So he gave careful and minute attention to every item. He was amid a protracted and wholly uninteresting account of a charity bazaar, which the Princess of Wales had opened, and where the Duchess of Blank-Blank had made a tremendous hit and much money for a worthy cause by selling her kisses for a guinea each when his attention was attracted by a discreet shuffling of feet on the floor beside his chair. He looked up to see the little fat Alsatian-German-French proprietor of the hotel.
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Burton Egbert Stevenson
Burton Egbert Stevenson (1872–1962) was an American author, anthologist, and librarian.
Biography
He was born in Chillicothe, Ohio, on 9 November 1872 and attended Princeton University from 1890–1893. He married Elizabeth Shepard Butler (1869–1960) in 1895. He died on May 13, 1962, and was buried in Chillicothe, Ohio. While at Princeton, Stevenson was a correspondent for the United Press and the New York Tribune. He was city editor for the Chillicothe Daily News (1894–1898) and worked for the Daily Advertiser (1898–1899). Stevenson became director of the Chillicothe Public Library in 1899 and held that position for 58 years. Stevenson was well known for his war efforts. At Camp Sherman, located in Chillicothe, Ohio, he established a library of 40,000 volumes and 22 branches.
The Camp Sherman library was said to be a model for national efforts to develop such libraries. In 1918, as Director of French operations for the Library War Service, he helped establish what would grow to become the American Library in Paris. He was the director of this ALA outpost from 1918 until the library was privatized in 1920 and returned from 1925–1930. He was then made European director of the American Library Association`s Library War Service, a position he held for seven years. As a librarian, Stevenson wrote numerous novels, including four young adult novels, edited others’ works, and created innumerable anthologies of verse, familiar quotations, and the like. Many of his anthologies are still in print. Marietta College awarded him the degree of Litt.D. in 1955. Stevenson Center at Ohio University-Chillicothe is named after him.
Burton Egbert Stevenson
