An Excerpt from “Part of Our Lives”

Interior of the Boston Public Library, 1858, one public place in the
city of Boston where men and women demonstrated the sociability
of reading. Courtesy Boston Public Library, Print Department.

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BY 1861, THE BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY held nearly 100,000 volumes, averaged 1,000 daily visits, and boasted a circulation of 160,000. A year earlier, trustees quietly tried to shift away from commonplace reading by buying “only the best of the lighter class of literature.” But circulation in Lower Hall fell precipitously. When trustees reversed their decision a year later, circulation climbed. By that time a pattern had emerged — fiction for adults and juveniles accounted for nearly 70 percent of BPL circulation. An 1866 examining committee noted “that although they might wish a different record, they must accept the condition as arising from the mental tendency of the masses of the community.” Thus, a tradition took root; patrons clearly voted their preferences in this civic institution they did not have to use. Trustees had to meet these preferences, or lose them as patrons. When Jewett died in 1868, the trustees replaced him with Justin Winsor, a prominent Boston Brahmin who as chair of the 1866 examining committee had carefully analyzed the library’s management. As the first in a large city, the BPL became a model replicated by a mushrooming number of small and large public libraries established in the late nineteenth century.

Within a decade, the public developed familiar public library behaviors. Saturdays were especially busy, one periodical noticed in 1866, when the reading room was “literally packed with applicants for books, a very large portion being young people.” When an Appletons’ Journal reporter visited in 1871, he thought the reading room “one of the sights of the city” at 6:00 p.m.

It fills to repletion. Children throng its floors, and are wonderfully sharp to the little tricks of competition for early attention. It is amusing to see with what rapidity an old stager of twelve years . . . will put his errand through. He will monopolize a wide section of desk-room with extended elbows, pounce in a single flourish upon the exact catalogue out of the many, get his number out of the multitude of other numbers, pencil it and his name with precise care upon his paper. . . . This well done, the boy must await developments; and, American-like, he improves the interval. He goes to the adjacent reading-room, and, securing an illustrated paper, sits himself down within sound of the attendant’s voice, to wait and read until his book or disappointment turns up.

At 8:00 p.m. all reading room seats were “occupied by a silent, mummy-like collection of people, who read with an avidity which resembles the satisfying of hunger. . . . Now and then one of the number rises and, going to the desk, silently exchanges his periodical for another. Every person is exceptionally neat, and this is very rare when such apartments open on the street. Nearly all come out of their lodgings and homes free of the dust of the day’s labor, and come hither with the idea of having a ‘read.’ ” In Bates Hall, the reporter noted, “Twenty or thirty people are usually to be found here, some writing, most of them reading hard, and a few gazing about them. All are quiet. Few sounds break the silence, except, now and then, the tap of the cancelling-stamp at the desk, a footfall in the corridors, or the faint rustle of book-leaves.” Books housed in Bates Hall could not be taken home but could be used “within the rail,” as contemporary parlance described it.

Between 1866 and 1870, use of Bates Hall increased 400 percent, use of the reading room and Lower Hall 300 percent. In 1871, the library opened a branch in East Boston. That year it circulated 74,804 volumes.

Within a decade the library added five more branches, yet circulation still increased at the central library. An 1869 annual report analyzed patron demographics. Of 5,432 men and 1,542 women who identified their occupations, 1,100 men and 542 women were in “trades and manufacturing,” 243 men and 6 women were “shopkeepers,” 2,006 men and 116 women were in “mercantile callings,” 746 men and 360 women were “professionals,” 165 men and three women were “officials,” and 1,632 men and 434 women were in “miscellaneous classes of occupation,” the latter including “oyster operators, cooks, errand girls, washerwomen, nurses, waiters, shopgirls, seamstresses, sewing machine operators, and servants.” Clearly the library was serving the laboring classes, albeit not with the useful knowledge cultural authorities and many library officials thought they needed most. In 1871, the Literary World reported, “more of [youth series-fiction writer] Oliver Optic’s books are taken” from the BPL than those of “any other authors.”

To protect ladies’ delicate sensibilities, the institution had rules to ensure that none got questionable materials. “H.” reported to the Boston Daily Advertiser in 1869 that a lady “who had often visited the library” wanted a medical book for her son. Although the book was on the shelves, librarians would not give it to her until she obtained a doctor’s certificate to prove her son intended to study medicine. Insulted, “this lady offered me her family library cards,” H. noted, “as she should use them no more.” Increased circulation and visitation brought other problems. In the public sphere, people often felt entitled to express their opinions, and from its beginnings, the public library offered unintended yet tempting opportunities for patrons to converse with authors they were reading. “An offensive class of writers,” the Transcript wrote in 1858, was leaving opinions on book pages. “Sometimes a passage of poetry will have ‘How beautiful!’ written in a feminine hand in the margin, or a proposition be flanked by ‘True,’ ‘Right,’ or ‘Doubtful.’ ”

Open access to periodicals also caused problems. Because “a few unscrupulous people” stole or mutilated them, “it became quite impossible to make up complete sets of popular journals for binding,” the Advertiser reported in 1866. In response, trustees adopted “restrictive measures” that delayed service. Complaints poured in. Trustees “are in danger of losing sight of the great public, of which the scholarly few form only a part,” protested one reader. “We hope that in selecting their remedy for such an evil,” said Advertiser editors, trustees “do not forget that use of its great attractions has been its freedom from harassing rules and regulations” that made New York ’s Astor Library “practically inaccessible to the great mass of people.” The Boston Public Library was not alone; the Detroit Public Library detailed fines for particular transgressions. “For each grease spot, 5 cents; for each ink spot, 5 cents; for each leaf torn, 10 cents; for each leaf turned down, 5 cents; for writing in a book, from 5 to 10 cents; and for other damage, including soiling the book or injuring the binding, proportionate fines up to the full value of the book.”

Although mutilation increased, theft did not. After reviewing BPL’s 1871 annual report, Appletons’ Journal marveled at the civic responsibility readers displayed. “How many volumes, out of the 180,000 possessed, are lost beyond redemption in a full working year? How many persons, out of the 300,000 who apply for favors, prove faithless and incapable of trust?” Appletons’ asked. “Twenty! Twenty books, having the value of perhaps $50. In other words, one book in 9,000; or one issue in 15,000; or $1 in $10,000.” By that time one in eight eligible Bostonians had borrowers’ cards. Still, numbers were suspect. Some particularly voracious readers bent the rules by registering under false names to withdraw more titles. Others “have taken two cards on one name at different times.”

Censorship was never far from public library practices. In 1873, Congress passed the Comstock Act; it was named for Anthony Comstock, who led a movement for the New York City YMCA Committee for the Suppression of Vice to have any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” book or other materials of “indecent” character (including information on contraception or abortion) banned from the mails. Thirty years later, George Bernard Shaw labeled overzealous efforts to purify culture “Comstockery,” a term still widely used to describe acts of censorship. Libraries took note; federal and state laws had imposed parameters on what they could collect. Public libraries did not complain, however. But library censorship worked in other ways. In 1872 a San Francisco public librarian asked the editor of Pomeroy’s Democrat to “stop sending your dirty sheet to this institution, as its politics is not tolerable.” The paper responded that it would not act until a majority of trustees “shall make the request civilly.”

By 1876, American cultural authorities were endorsing four modes of reading. Among public sphere institutions, the church was the strongest advocate for the evangelical mode, the school for the civic mode, while social and public libraries established to disseminate useful knowledge advocated the self-improvement mode, illustrated nicely by the experiences of Thomas Edison. As a Detroit teenager in the 1860s, Edison decided to read through the entire public library. “He began with the solid treatises of a dusty lower shelf and actually read . . . fifteen feet in a line,” an interviewer noted. “He omitted no book and skipped nothing in the book.” Many were scientific treatises. A few years later in the Cincinnati Public Library, a colleague recalled: “Many times Edison would get excused from duty under pretense of being too sick to work, . . . and invariably strike a beeline for the Library, where he would spend the entire day and evening reading . . . such works on electricity as were to be had.”

Proof that the public library’s self-improvement reading mode also included efforts to grow an informed citizenry was evident in newspaper reading rooms. When the Chicago Public Library opened in 1872, it had daily editions of all Chicago’s newspapers, plus 23 US newspapers and more than 200 newspapers and periodicals from seventeen countries, all to meet the information needs of Chicago’s growing immigrant population and all its “classes.” In 1873, Cincinnati’s reading room subscribed to 310 periodicals (138 US periodicals, 96 from English-speaking foreign countries, 60 German, 12 French, 3 Dutch, and 1 Welsh), all the city newspapers as well as one from New York and one from Boston.

But the fourth mode of reading — cultural reading — describes the experiences of most late-nineteenth-century public library users. Although libraries claimed to be civic institutions primarily concerned with useful knowledge, the vast majority of readers wanted stories that satisfied their social and cultural needs. And the interpretive conventions and social practices readers brought to these texts show that readers used these stories to locate themselves in the public sphere as particular kinds of actors. Because of print’s ability to create mass culture, voluntary reading — the kind public libraries best facilitated — became a way to build and maintain social networks. Reading also functioned as a cultural project where individual readers read themselves into texts, and it facilitated a kind of character building and cultural refinement that was concerned with aesthetic as well as intellectual satisfactions.

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Wayne A. Wiegand is F. William Summers Professor Emeritus of Library and Information Studies at Florida State University and former director of the Florida Book Awards.

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Reprinted from Part of Our Lives: A People's History of the American Public Library by Wayne A. Wiegand with permission from Oxford University Press, Inc.  Copyright © 2015 by Oxford University Press.