"What is the inner compulsion that drives a man to track down stories, poems, articles and catalog them in a bibliography? Why should he persue a lost story like a wolverine pursues his prey, doggedly and determinedly to the end?" Jesse Stuart asked this question in an essay he wrote about my husband, Hensley Charles Woodbridge. The answer would be a clue to Hensley's personality. To me it seems to be a love for knowledge and a desire to get bits and scraps down in some order to be passed on to others. And there's a zest for searching in it too, and a voracious yen for books.

On any vacation Hensley enjoys scenery and points of historical interest, but let him get to a library or a bookstore that he hasn't seen before. Here he is "like a berry picker who has found a patch of ripe wild berries waiting to be picked" to quote his friend Stuart again.

Among his mother's memories of Hensley's childhood, the ease of taking him shopping stands out. She just dropped him at a bookstore or a book department of a large store, and returned hours later to find him quietly browsing through the books.

His mania for reading, collecting and cataloging information caused Hensley as a child to list all the animals named in Webster's unabridged dictionary and copy their definitions on to cards. At that time he dreamed of being a zoo keeper someday. And he completed the list as he later classified and indexed information about any subject in which he or one of his friends felt a consuming interest.

As a boy, Hensley earned his first money collecting and preserving insects for college biology students, always recording the exact location of each find.

Hensley spent his childhood in Williamsburg, Virginia, to which his parents moved when he was four from his birthplace, Champaign, Illinois, where his father had studied law. His father, Dudley Warner Woodbridge, professor of law and later dean of law at William and Mary, hoped to interest his oldest son in international law and sent Hensley, age 13, to live with a French family for a year in 1936-1937. He hired a private tutor to instruct his son in German and later sent Hensley, age 18, to study Spanish in Mexico.

Hensley never developed an interest in law, but the language study his father began and encouraged became one of his major vocations. In high school he edited a French Newspaper, Le Coq d'or, for his school, Mathew Whaley, and won honorable mention and prizes in both Latin and French.

While attending William and Mary he wrote his first publications, letters to the editors of the Richmond Times Dispatch, Richmond News Leader and the washington Post, always signing a nom de plume Charles de Boispont or Carlos Puente de Nadera.

After taking an A.B. degree from William and Mary with a major in French in 1943, Hensley worked as a cryptographer for the U. S. government in Washington during World War II.

He went back to Mexico for a year's study at the National University in 1945. During this time he wrote news articles for the Worldover Press. His first published articles treated of Mexico and appeared in Commonweal and the Indian Social Reformer (Bombay) in 1945.

In 1946 he earned an M.A. fron Harvard in Romance Languages and in 1946-1947 taught French and Spanish at the University of Richmond. He attended the University of Illinois from 1947 to 1951, earning a Ph.D. in Spanish and an M.S. in Library Science. While at Champaign he published his first bibliography, five pages long, in Italica; subject: Professor John Van Horne, head of the Department of Spanish and Italian. At this time also he published an article on anthropology in the Journal of the Washington Academy of Science.

From 1951-1953 Hensley served as reference librarian at Auburn, Alabama. While there he published two bibliographies of Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan nautical dictionaries in the Mariner's Mirror in England. He also wrote his first article accepted by Hispania.

In 1953 when Hensley moved to Murray State, Murray, Kentucky, as head librarian, Dr. Lawerence S. Thompson, Director of Libraries, University of Kentucky, wrote of him in College and Research Libraries: "He brings to Murray a valuable background of research in Hispanic philology. . . . Dr. Woodbridge's new associates at Murray will find he combines a keen sense of humor with his competence as a librarian and a scholar, and he is a profound believer in the humane tradition of librarianship."

At Murray he married the Spanish and French teacher whose home was conveniently located just across the street from the libray. Here, too, his only child Ruby Susan was born in 1954.

Hensley became interested in the Kentucky author Jesse Stuart, began corresponding with him and after visiting with Stuart and studying manuscripts, notes and scrapbooks compiled a Stuart bibliography. This was the first book published about Stuart and Hensley's first published book. A revision appeared in 1969, adding a bibliography of Jane Stuart, Jesse's daughter.

Several friends on the Murray faculty suggested topics for bibliographies. Hensley and his friend Hunter Hancock, head of the Department of Biology, compiled a bibliography of the striped bass published by the Sport Fishing Institute of America. Another friend, Clell Peterson, Professor of English, interested Hensley in working with him on a bibliography of Jack London.

London's publishers, Macmillan, when informed of the project, answered that a bibliography of Jack London was impossible. However, Hensley and Clell didn't give up. Two other men whom neither of them had seen, John London and George Tweney, joined the project. Later Peterson became interested in other subjects and dropped out.

Hensley began corresponding with London scholars and collectors in many countries: Vil Bykov, Moscow, U.S.S.R.; Ray Gardner, Toronto, Canada; Edward Allat, West Drayton, England; Sakai Fujiwara, Japan. He also corresponded with London's daughter Joan.

The only summer he's had off during the nineteen years we've been married, he spent in San Marino, California, relishing a search into Jack London papers at the Huntington Library. He walked two miles each weekday as regularly as he would have gone to his library job at home to fill hundreds of note cards with London information. It interested Hensley that many of the Huntington scholars considered London a children's writer and were interested mainly in whether or not he had committed suicide. They thought he had written only The Call of the Wild and animal stories.

When the bibliography appeared in 1966 it was 423 pages long. Hensley and John London had worked on it from 1960 to 1966; Tweney from 1963 to 1966. The London Times Literary Supplement, May 11, 1967, in a review stated: "Woodbridge . . . London . . . and Tweney have done a remarkably thorough job in documenting the output of 'California's most prolific and controversial novelist' . . . They modestly disclaim completeness, but their seven-year industry has been prodigious."

A revised edition will appear sometime in 1972 with a 125 page supplement. It will have approximately 560 pages and will be published by Kraus Reprint Corporation.

When we moved to Carbondale, Illinois, in 1965, Hensley wanted to get away from signing invoices and to spend more time in his subject field of interest. He was to be Latin American bibliographer for SIU Morris Library and teach in the Foreign Language Department.

His favorite class, Bibliography and Research Methods for graduate students of Spanish, was so successful that the French division asked him to teach a similar course for them. He did this and in the fall of '72 he will offer for the first time a bibliography class for the German division also. Two of his students have had bibliographies written for his class published; one, Michael Fody, had his paper appear in the outstanding journal of the world in the field of dialectology, Orbis (Belgium)

So the man whom Clell Peterson called west Kentucky's demon bibliographer is now turning out even more bibliographies from Southern Illinois. His thirty page work on Rubén Darío appeared in Hispania, 1967-68. A Spanish translation by Torres is to be published as a book in León, Nicaragua, this year or next. His 70 page small type bibliography of Pérez Galdós, December, 1970, is the longest article Hispania has ever used.

If you saw Hensley almost any day rushing from one card catalog to another you might think as one neighbor commented that he's the fastest walker you've ever seen, or, as another said, that he moves around like a boy. His greying black hair often lacks the little dab that would tame it. His tie may be tied with the small half on top, and if he has a hat on it's likely to be on backwards, but under the hat there's a zeal for setting notes in order. Talk to him on almost any subject and his blue eyes, one of which lost its sight as he was born, register interest. His questions show that he's trying to learn, store up knowledge and tie it to what he now knows.

One of the things his friends and co-workers remark on is his tendency to misplace his clothes. The circulation desk Lost and Found often reports, "We have more of Dr. Woodbridge's clothes here." One colleague retrieved a hat from the grass by the library entrance. Disorder may reign on his desk or in his study, but his mind is arranging facts with logic and order.

Of comments I've heard from students I remember: "He's helped me more than anyone else on my thesis." "Tell him I made an A on the paper he helped me find the material for." "If there's anything in the library, he knows where to find it."

I once tried to do a bibliography of this bibliographer, but lacking his tenacity, I gave up. To complete the job would have meant listing four books, four translations, 100 articles and bibliographies, 200 book reviews. These publications have appeared in thirty magazines in six countries: India, Great Britain, Spain, Belgium, Mexico, and the United States.

I should have mentioned, too, that he is associate editor of Hispania and the American Book Collector, a member of the editorial board of the Modern Language Journal, editor of the Jack London Newsletter, and a former editor of the Kentucky Folklore Record and the Bulletin of the Kentucky Library Association.

Biographies of Hensley, much shorter than this one, appear in Who's Who in America, Contemporary Authors, and the Dictionary of International Biography.

If I couldn't compile a bibliography, how can I do justice to a biography? I've listed many facts, but I've omitted his gentleness, his kindness, many traits all important to his family, his friends and to me, his missing rib. I'll close saying as he said of London, "the scholarly biography is yet to be written."