There are people who write a lot. (I’ve spilled plenty of cyber-ink on this very series, for instance.) And then there are people who are Isaac Asimov (a club of one so far). Born 95 years ago on January 2, 1920, Asimov left behind a stunning bibliography when he died in 1992 at age 72…a mini-library of his own making, with more than 500 books supplemented by 90,000 letters and postcards.

And just to be clear, he didn’t fill up 500 books with sci-fi stories. Yes, he was one of the most celebrated science fiction authors in history. (His “Foundation,” “Galactic Empire,” and “Robot” series were all tied together into the same fictional future.) Asimov delved into almost every corner of the library you can imagine. Here’s the proof: His entire bibliography spans nine of the 10 major categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification system, meaning he wrote works of computer science, religion, social science, linguistics, hard science, technology, arts and recreation, literature, and history and geography. (Philosophy and psychology is the only outlier...a category he did cover, but in his personal essays, not his books.) He wrote joke books, dirty books, two massive guides to the Bible, and on and on. He wrote so much that he even wrote retrospectives about his own writing every hundredth book: “Opus 100,” “Opus 200,” and “Opus 300.”

When he wasn’t keeping librarians busy, he moved onto other minor projects, like redesigning the entire calendar or offering technical advice to the “Star Trek” creative crew. A Russian Jew whose family emigrated to New York when he was three, he grew up in Brooklyn and seldom traveled far. (He was afraid of flying.) Asimov received 14 honorary doctorates during his lifetime and taught biochemistry at Boston University. But as a vice president of Mensa, he seemed bored. (He described its membership as “brain proud and aggressive about their IQs.”) He seemed to take more joy in being president of the American Humanist Association, and became open about his atheism in later life. Fittingly for someone whose interests stretched so far, his name has been attached to items both terrestrial and extraterrestrial. He has an asteroid and a Martian crater named after him, as well as an elementary school in Brooklyn and a literary award.

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