circulating library Concepts

The Library: A Fragile History

by Arthur Der Weduwen and Andrew Pettegree · 14 Oct 2021 · 457pp · 173,326 words

the perilous voyage, for some years the press lay dormant. But within thirty years the new colony had a newspaper and bookshops, and soon circulating libraries: all accoutrements of polite English society imported from a homeland half a world away.1 The first library carried to Spanish America was, appropriately enough

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, or because the proprietors of the circulating libraries put economic considerations first, and gave their customers what they wanted. This caused considerable ructions in the library world. Collectors of books and custodians of

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parts of the world and offered the first frail shoots of the later globalisation of library provision.3 With the rapid growth of subscription and circulating libraries, for the first time borrowing books became a plausible alternative to ownership. This, too, was a crucial development. Of course, in every age, those

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loaning out books or charging customers a small fee to read in their shop from at least 1661, the honour of establishing the first documented circulating library falls to Allan Ramsay, poet of Edinburgh. In 1725, Ramsay opened his lending library, charging an annual subscription, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik being

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absolute was their reliance on novels. When, in 1793, Professor James Beattie visited a bookshop in Dundee and expressed his surprise at finding ‘merely a circulating library of novels’, the booksellers acknowledged that ‘nothing else was read in Dundee’.29 The London proprietors certainly enjoyed a privileged position in the trade, able

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Clay’s surviving records of 1770–72 are particularly useful because we can compare the business of his bookshop with the contents of his small circulating library. These confirm the widespread assumption that readers borrowed rather than purchased fiction. The stock of the bookshop consisted largely of books for children and

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advancement. Yet abundance brought its own challenges: if books became cheaper, the imperative to borrow, rather than own, which had sustained the subscription and circulating libraries in the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, fell away. The public library had to find a motive, a clientele, and a

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Art Collection/Getty Images. 4. Beauty in Search of Knowledge (London: Robert and John Bennett Sayer, 1782). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: RP-P-2015-26-946; The Circulating Library (London: Laurie & Whittle, 1804). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: RP-P-2015-26-1356. 5. Büchersaal der neuen Bibliothek im Britischen Museum zu London (Leipzig: Johann Jacob

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’, p. 308. 27. Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), p. 15. 28. Norbert Schürer, ‘Four Catalogues of the Lowndes Circulating Library, 1755–66’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 101 (2007), pp. 327–57. 29. Manley, Books, Borrowers and Shareholders, pp. 2–3. 30. Allan

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pamphlet Literature at Nurse. See Pierre Coustillas (ed.), George Moore, Literature at Nurse: A Polemic on Victorian Censorship (Brighton: EER, 2017). 42. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library, pp. 75, 83. 43. Ibid, p. 61. 14. Building Empires 1. J. E. Traue, ‘The Public Library Explosion in Colonial New Zealand’, Libraries & the

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(Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1909), p. 25. 33. Glynn, Reading Publics, p. 5. 34. Lee Erickson, ‘The Economy of Novel Reading: Jane Austen and the Circulating Library’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 30 (1990), pp. 573–90. 35. Quoted in Arthur P. Young, Books for Sammies: The American Library Association and

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, 1999). 53. McAleer, Popular Reading, p. 106. 54. See chapter 13. 55. Nicola Wilson, ‘Boots Book-lovers’ Library and the Novel: The Impact of a Circulating Library Market on Twentieth-century Fiction’, Information & Culture, 49 (2014), pp. 427–49. 56. McAleer, Popular Reading, p. 114. 57. Janice A. Radway, Reading the

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in Mid-Eighteenth-century London’, The Library, 7th series, 10 (2009), pp. 3–40. Erickson, Lee, ‘The Economy of Novel Reading: Jane Austen and the Circulating Library’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 30 (1990), pp. 573–90. Falconer, Graham, ‘New light on the Bibliothèque Cardinal’, Nineteenth-century French Studies, 41 (

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2013), pp. 292–304. Fergus, Jan, ‘Eighteenth-century Readers in Provincial England: The Customers of Samuel Clay’s Circulating Library and Bookshop in Warwick, 1770–72’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 78 (1984), pp. 155–213. Fergus, Jan, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-century

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and Géza Schütz, ‘Goethe the Librarian’, Library Quarterly, 2 (1932), pp. 367–74. Grenby, M. O., ‘Adults Only? Children and Children’s Books in British Circulating Libraries, 1748–1848’, Book History, 5 (2002), pp. 19–38. Griest, Guinevere L., ‘A Victorian Leviathan: Mudie’s Select Library’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 20 (1965), pp

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The Journal of Library History, 9 (1974), pp. 31–53. Lewis, John Frederick, History of the Apprentices’ Library of Philadelphia, 1820–1920: The Oldest free Circulating Library in America (Philadelphia, PA: Apprentices’ Library Company, 1924). Manley, K. A., Books, Borrowers and Shareholders: Scottish circulating and subscription libraries before 1825: a survey and

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of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–1850 (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Schürer, Norbert, ‘Four Catalogues of the Lowndes Circulating Library, 1755–66’, Proceedings of the Bibliographical Society of America, 101 (2007), pp. 327–57. Shera, J. H., Foundations of the Public Library: The Origins

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North America’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 11 (1848), pp. 250–81. Erickson, Lee, ‘The Economy of Novel Reading: Jane Austen and the Circulating Library’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 30 (1990), pp. 573–90. Flint, Kate, The Woman Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Fullerton, Ronald A., ‘Creating

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History of the American Public Library (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Wilson, Nicola, ‘Boots Book-lovers’ Library and the Novel: The Impact of a Circulating Library Market on Twentieth-century Fiction’, Information & Culture, 49 (2014), pp. 427–49. Winter, Jackie, Lipsticks and Library Books: The Story of Boots Booklovers Library (

Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents

by Lisa Gitelman · 26 Mar 2014

. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 174 sachusetts Press, 2007), 154. Notably Augst is writing about public circulating libraries like the Boston Public Library, not private libraries like Harvard’s. Quoted in Wirtén, No Trespassing, 66. See Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy, 235

Hemingway Didn't Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations

by Garson O'Toole · 1 Apr 2017 · 376pp · 91,192 words

’s statement was further disseminated in 1837 when his letter to the Athenaeum discussed above was excerpted in a weekly compilation called Waldie’s Select Circulating Library based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.4 In 1845 Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine printed a book review that included an instance of the saying without attribution

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: A Venetian Story (London: John Murray, 1818), 25. Accessed in Google Books, https://goo.gl/sbjWu3. 4. The Journal of Belles Lettres, [Waldie’s] Select Circulating Library, Containing the Best Popular Literature 25 (June 20, 1837), 3. Accessed in Google Books, https://goo.gl/6wgKf6. 5. Review of Lectures, Addressed Chiefly to

Piracy : The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates

by Adrian Johns · 5 Jan 2010 · 636pp · 202,284 words

was even a standardized retail price, twopence per sheet, and those for whom this was too high might find books at one of the proliferating circulating libraries. Individual buyers remained urban rather than rural, Protestant rather than Catholic. This was the domestic readership that the reprint industry addressed and in turn spurred

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life

by Eric Klinenberg · 10 Sep 2018 · 281pp · 83,505 words

turn named its landmark building on Fifth Avenue after him. And in 2017, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation gave $55 million to renovate Manhattan’s major circulating library, just across from the Schwarzman building. These are extraordinary contributions, but they’re just a drop in the bucket compared with what cities around the

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-Gates-Establish-Library-Foundation. just need companionship to get through the day: Until 2017, when the Stavros Niarchos Foundation gave $55 million to rebuild the circulating library in Midtown, the last major effort to invest in the New York City Public Library was a misguided, massively expensive, and ultimately ill-fated effort

The Railways: Nation, Network and People

by Simon Bradley · 23 Sep 2015 · 916pp · 248,265 words

it was not necessary to buy a book from Smiths in order to read it: the nineteenth century was the great age of the private circulating library, and Smiths had joined the boom in 1860. Its model was the famous business set up by Charles Edward Mudie, which had operated from New

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the brain Or startle apathy. As soon as the day’s last train had gone, Branwell headed uphill to the inn, where there was a circulating library and the prospect of lively conversation. Then he began slipping away before the last train, leaving the porter to issue tickets and keep the books

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-pulp books: Sutherland, 527. p. 127 Henry James; much else that was disreputable; Esther Waters: Wilson, C., 88; 166, 375; 365–8. p. 128 private circulating library: Flanders, 184–6; Wilson, C., 355–60. p. 128 the issuing stall: Willes, 203. p. 128 The Savoy: Sturgis, 192. p. 129n Fenian bomb: Jackson

Arabs: A 3,000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith · 2 Mar 2019

is all. And all that can be said with certainty is that, in western Arabia in late pagan times, there was a kind of oral circulating library – of parables from ancient times, snippets of knowledge about the Jewish and Christian scriptures, and ideas about creation and the nature of the monotheistic God

How to Fix Copyright

by William Patry · 3 Jan 2012 · 336pp · 90,749 words

works available.That decline began to turn around only at the end of the 1740s, due to the advent of the ﬁrst generation of commercial circulating libraries, and the wider use of new, innovative forms of printing. The most dramatic increase in publishing came in the two decades following the House of

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics

by Christopher Lasch · 16 Sep 1991 · 669pp · 226,737 words

hope of cultural democracy. Once the masses enjoyed leisure, affluence, and education, they would become discriminating consumers of art, letters, and ideas. Museums, concert halls, circulating libraries, and the new technologies of cultural reproduction—phonograph records, cheap editions of books, photographic copies of famous paintings—would give ordinary people access to the

The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

by Evan Friss · 5 Aug 2024 · 493pp · 120,793 words

was bleeding money. Two blocks south, the Workers’ Bookshop increasingly became a destination. It hosted reading groups, exhibitions on the history of Marxism, and a circulating library where party members borrowed books for fifteen cents a week. Pro-Communist gear was on sale, too. Show your support for the cause, shop staff