Laura Steffens Suggett

Laura Steffens was born in Sacramento, California, the daughter of Joseph Steffens and Elizabeth Louisa Symes Steffens. Her father was a prominent banker, born in Canada; her mother was born in England.[1] Her brother was writer Lincoln Steffens.[2] The Steffens home in Sacramento, where she lived as a teenager, became the California governor's mansion in 1903. She graduated from Stanford University in 1896.[3][4] with further studies in Leipzig.[5]

The California State Library appointed Steffens as chief of the state library's extension service in 1903, and she was tasked with creating a traveling library for rural Californians. She founded and edited the journal News Notes of California Libraries. She moved to San Francisco in 1917 to run the Sutro Library there.[6][7] She chaired the Conditions of Librarians Committee of the California Library Association.[8] She proposed a "morgue for dead manuscripts", offering to house two copies of authors' works: the manuscript they produced, and the published edition, as an "invaluable historical record".[9] She left the Sutro in 1923.[6]

Suggett published The Beginning and the End of the Best Library Service in the World (1924), a "melodramatic account"[10] of her work with the State Library Extension Service,[11][12] and The California Library Service (1925).[13][14] Upton Sinclair promoted her 1924 book in his newspaper column, saying "Mrs. Suggett's book gives the details of this plan, and you see what a beautiful and loving and generous and civilized thing it was."[15]

In 1909, Steffens made news when she injured her eye in a "novel" pencil-sharpening accident at the library.[16] In 1918,[17] Laura Steffens married dentist and college professor Allen Holman Suggett, her sister's widower.[3][18] She "suffered a mental breakdown" in the early 1930s, and saw Carl Jung in Zürich for treatment.[19] She died in 1946, aged 71. In 2020, she was inducted into the California Library Hall of Fame.[8]