Even though I no longer use them very much (having more than enough books of my own to read) I am very much in favour of public libraries. It’s partly that I’m thankful for the way my local library helped me when I was a boy hungry for knowledge growing up in a household with few books. There all the books were. There seemed to be books about everything, and all the classics of English literature (and other literatures). And it was all free. Paradise.
Today, arguably, it’s different. Everything’s online, isn’t it? Well, no. And anyway not everyone has access to a computer. And not everyone knows how to find information. And for all kinds of good reasons many people still prefer to read a novel in a real volume with paper pages. One of my nieces worked for a while in a small branch library here in the Cotswolds and was amazed how many people needed her help to find things out – everything from the biographical details of an English poet to how to apply for a council tax rebate. ‘I’m a social worker, too, apparently,’ she told me. Libraries are still essential.
But what did people do before 1850, when the British Parliament passed an act enabling local authorities to levy a rate to pay for public libraries? Here’s one answer. They went to privately run libraries, which were owned by local businesses (or, less commonly, by private organisations such as the still wonderful London Library, where you pay to be a member, as I did when I lived in London).
Most towns did not have a vast bibliographical treasure house like the London Library but they often had a private library run perhaps by a local stationer, where they could pay to borrow books. Boots the chemist had libraries in their large shops, too. And many of these privately run libraries survived well into the. last century because people liked them and they might have different books form those at the local public library. Here’s a ghost sign in Petersfield, advertising a local stationery business owned by one Llewelyn Bradley. Alongside the writing materials and newspapers there were also reading materials that you could borrow. Bradley was born in 1877 and probably sold up in the 1930s, after which the business – still with its library – was known as Austin’s.* An online source refers to a picture of c. 1955 but after that the trail goes cold, so I don’t know how long it survived. But there it was, another bit of history for which we have to thank a ghost sign, which, on the building at least, is the only bit of reading matter now offered hereabouts. No doubt the people of Petersfield were thankful for it, while it lasted.
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* Austin’s, with its books, toys and ‘fancy goods’, is said to have been the inspiration for the children’s book The Little Wooden Horse, by Ursula Moray Williams.
5 comments:
The Wantage Novel Library survived as a sort of going concern until about a decade ago, though it apparently ceased to be a subscription library in the 80s or even earlier. http://www.icknieldindagations.com/2019/12/farewell-wantage-novel-library.html
I've just reread my blog post and notice that I reference your blog post about the Wantage library, so evidently I'm not telling you anything you don't know! Sorry.
No problem, David. I've left your comments here anyway, for the benefit of those who look at the comments section. You knew, and I knew – now the others do too.
Benjamin Franklin founded an early subscription library in Philadelphia. Now, I don't know where you'd go to find one, unless you count the libraries of private clubs. A friend who belongs to the Boston Athenaeum showed me its library once, and I suppose that comparable clubs in other cities have fair libraries also.
Andrew Carnegie gave a lot of money for the building of public libraries. I had supposed they were all in the white marble Americans think proper for public buildings, but find that I was wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_library.
I think many private circulating libraries had lower- brow books than the public ones. I often come across the books in secondhand shops, and mostly the stickers firmly attached to them say they are from Boots - which was a national organisation of course. (I have always wondered why a chemists should have a circulating library). I believe the Boots library was a bit snobby, with first and second class subscribers!
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