[On May
23rd, 1895, the project which would become the New York Public Library was launched. So for
the 125th anniversary, I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of libraries and
library contexts, leading up to a special post on the NYPL!]
On the
groundbreaking communal library that helped democratize such spaces.
Libraries seem
to have been around about as long as human societies—as illustrated by the
prominent and tragic case of the Egyptian Great
Library of Alexandria—but it’s fair to say that for their first couple
millennia they were significantly elitist in both practice and purpose. That
is, it’s not just that libraries tended to be accessible only to those with the
privilege necessary to access and use them (and, for much of human history,
with the literacy that came along with said privilege)—I would also argue that
the purpose of such libraries was precisely to reinforce and extend that
privilege, indeed to help ensure that it would be passed down from generation
to generation (hence the preponderance of royal
and family libraries, and then their creation as part of the university system
which likewise functioned as another site of privilege for hundreds of years). None
of that means that the texts and knowledge contained in these libraries were
any less meaningful, but it’s nonetheless important to recognize the social and
hierarchical roles that the spaces themselves generally played.
Those roles
didn’t evolve or shift toward our current, far more democratized world of
public libraries in any single moment, of course—but as with any historical
change, there are at the same time particular events that serve as signposts
along the way. At least in American history, one of the earliest and most
significant such signposts was the July 1st,
1731 founding of the Library Company
of Philadelphia. Ben Franklin had been in the city for nearly a decade by
this time, having first moved there from Boston in 1723 (at the age of 17), and
had over the prior few years formed with other intellectually and civically
inclined young men an informal discussion group (or, as he put it in his Autobiography, a “club for mutual
benefit and improvement”) known as the Junto. They needed books for their
pursuits, but were each of limited means and purchasing books (generally at the
time from London) was prohibitively expensive. So they pooled both their
existing books and their book budgets, and in the process (in a very Ben Franklin-like
move) drew
up formal articles to constitute this shared collection as a library. They
even hired America’s first librarian, Philadelphia printer
Louis Timothee, to manage that collection and its lending practices.
Those practices
didn’t entirely mirror how 21st century public libraries work: as
detailed in the Company’s founding articles, “members” (like the founders, but
also all those who sought to join subsequently) had to pay a subscription fee
(40 shillings upon joining, and 10 shillings a year after that), and then were
able to borrow the books for free. But of course the Company had no
governmental nor public support, so this fee was necessary both to purchase
books and pay the librarian. Moreover, in a piece entitled “A Short Account of the Library”
and included in the Company’s 1741 catalog, Franklin notes that the collection
was also accessible to non-members; when they borrowed a book they had to
deposit money equal to its cost, but their money would be paid back when they
returned the book, meaning that the collection was ultimately free for
non-members as well. That detail makes clear that membership was intended to be
practical and communal but not elitist or exclusionary, and that, like so many
of Franklin’s civic-minded ideas for his adopted city, the Library Company of
Philadelphia was indeed created as a groundbreaking and inspiring way to
democratize books and reading.
Next library
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
the Library Company, or other libraries you’d highlight/celebrate?
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