George L. Van Bibber IV photograph collection

George Lindenburger Van Bibber IV was born on March 12, 1906, in Harford County, Maryland. He was the son of Armfield Franklin Van Bibber (d.1953) and Susanna Rebecca [Michael] Van Bibber (d.1955). He had one brother Edwin M. (d.1967) and two sisters Katherine and Ann (Mrs. William T. Whitney).

Van Bibber was a life-long resident of Bel Air, living at 303 Main Street, his childhood home. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 1929 with a degree in architecture and was employed as a draftsman in the Edgewood Arsenal from 1936-1960. His real interests lay however in local history, travel, literature and the cinema. He made numerous trips abroad, culminating in a five-month round-the-world voyage in 1975.

Van Bibber was active in the Harford County Historical Society, serving on its Bicentennial Commission and writing a monograph “Notes on Bel Air - a character sketch of our county seat.” He designed the seal for Harford County and the town seals for Bel Air, Aberdeen and Havre de Grace. Van Bibber was also a charter member of the Highland Society of Harford County and designed the shield that is part of the official seal of the organization.

Over the years Van Bibber contributed numerous columns to local newspapers. He wrote “Crazy Horse Spoke” for the News Advertiser and the Havre de Grace Record and “Henry Harf Hath Hearde” published in the Bel Air Aegis. He illustrated his columns with drawings and caricatures.

Van Bibber never married. After the death of his mother in 1955, he began renting rooms in his house to boarders and having all his meals in the restaurants and cafes of Bel Air. This habit ensured that Van Bibber was a familiar personage in the town and his diaries are full of references to pedestrians or motorists hailing him during his perambulations.

Throughout much of his life Van Bibber was plagued by insomnia and many of the later volumes of his diary record his efforts to occupy the hours of sleeplessness. Many of these hours were spent on the diary itself with its time-consuming transcriptions, amendments, indexing and the like. Indeed it occasionally seems as if the diary were the focus and raison d’être of Van Bibber's life with many of the elaborations of style, annotations etc. growing out of a need to occupy his thoughts and time. The days were structured by the grooves of habits and patterns repeated over the years but Van Bibber's relatively unfettered and solitary existence was made even more inward-directed and solitary by the regimen of keeping his diary.

Van Bibber also suffered from alcoholism. The gradual progression from the exuberant drinking of a college youth to social drinking as a young adult to dependence and abuse of alcohol in maturity is evident in the pages of the diary -- indeed, there must exist few autobiographical accounts of the disease as meticulous as this one. In 1968 Van Bibber was hospitalized for several weeks in a state of near physical collapse after one particularly severe period of abuse. As a result of this episode, with its attendant warnings of fatality, Van Bibber embarked on a period of abstinence which lasted ten years. He frequented the same familiar cafes and kept the same company without jeopardizing his own resolution.

Van Bibber died on March 26, 1979, after an illness of several weeks.