Arthur Fremont Rider (May 25, 1885 – October 26, 1962)[1] was an American writer, poet, editor, inventor, genealogist, and librarian.

The family was originally from Middletown, Connecticut, and Rider reports in his biography that his birth in New Jersey was an “accident” resulting from his father's frequent business trips to that state, on this occasion having brought his wife.

Rider himself claims in his autobiography that, although he attended school and received good marks, as a child he was largely self-educated at the Russell Public Library in Middletown.

Rider attended New York State Library School in 1907, but left before graduating to help his mentor, Melvil Dewey, on a revision of the latter's Decimal Classification system.

[4] Fremont Rider wrote on numerous topics throughout his life, and voiced his opinion and suggested solutions for the problems he saw in many of them.

[7] While working at The Delineator he wrote his first book, Are the Dead Alive in which he attempted to present the case for psychical research, and in general was what Rider believed to be an objective approach to the popular subject of “Spiritualism.”[8] At the height of the Great Depression Rider published an article in The North American Review in which he identified the class warfare promoted by industrial unions as the principal cause of the labor troubles, although he admitted that the solution to the problem of “poverty amidst plenty” was not to cut back on production, but to increase wages, and so “increase purchasing power” of those who would buy the products of industrial and agricultural industry.

His proposed solution for the question of legislative power allotted to the various nation participants was one based on an “intellectual” index, that would translate, in his words, to “very real, but vaguely defined, concept that we call ‘national importance’.”[10] In 1933 Rider returned to Middletown to take a permanent librarianship position at Wesleyan.

Upon the reverse, Rider wanted to reproduce “as many as 250 pages of an ordinary 12mo book on the back of a single card.”[14] The idea was inspired by recent developments he had been following in the production and printing of micro-text, especially by the Readex Microprint Corporation.

Researchers would search the catalogue for the entry they wished, and then having selected it would take the card to a reader machine which might be no bigger than a briefcase.

[17][18][19] In addition, while director of Olin, Rider "started putting together the idea for a monumental index that would help genealogists all over the world in their research.