Kathie Coblentz was "a Renaissance woman who read or spoke 13 languages; collaborated on books about the directors Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood and Alfred Hitchcock; and, during her day job, cataloged rare books for more than 50 years at The New York Public Library".

"Ms. Coblentz was recruited for a library job in 1969 even before she graduated from the University of Michigan, said Anthony W. Marx, the library’s president and CEO."

"Ms. Coblentz was a bibliophile with interests that ranged well beyond the written word. Her blog on the library’s website was full of eclectic arcana. She demystified a Wikipedia debate over whether the Syrian author of “Scala Paradisi” wrote in the sixth or seventh century. And she rhapsodized about photographs of the last “blue blood moon” seen over North America in 1866."

"Kathie Lynn Coblentz was born on Nov. 4, 1947. Her father was Dr. Jacob Coblentz, an immigrant born in Riga, Latvia, who was a bacteriologist in Lansing, Mich., where she appears to have been born. He also worked in Tennessee and Ohio before settling in Frankfort, Mich., where he was employed by the Pet Evaporated Milk Company and the Michigan Department of Health; he died when she was 10. Her mother was Sidney Ellarea Coblentz, an art teacher and artist."

"She earned a degree in German from Michigan State University in 1968 and a master’s of library science from the University of Michigan in 1969. She learned Danish, Norwegian and Swedish so that she could read her favorite Scandinavian authors of murder mysteries unaltered by translation."

(source: The New York Times)