Reading Publics ─ New York City's Public Libraries, 1754-1911

On May 11, 1911, the New York Public Library opened its "marble palace for booklovers" on Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street. This was the city's first public library in the modern sense, boasting a tax-supported, circulating collection free to every citizen. Since before the Revolution, however, New York's reading public used a range of public libraries as the term was understood by contemporaries. In its most basic sense a public library in the eighteenth century and most of the nineteenth century simply meant a shared collection of books that was accessible to the general public. These libraries took a variety of forms. Some of them were free, charitable institutions while others required a membership or an annual subscription. Some were highly specialized, while others developed extensive, inclusive collections. What these libraries had in common, at least ostensibly, was the conviction that good books helped ensure a productive, virtuous, orderly republic, that good reading promoted the public good.

Most histories of public libraries in the United States begin in or after 1876, the year in which the American Library Association was founded. They focus solely on the "modern" public library. A history of the institution in the city of New York over the course of more than a century and a half shows how the public and private functions of reading changed over time and how shared collections of books could serve both public and private ends. Additionally, an exploration of how the definition of a public library shifted over time sheds light on changes in how the public conceived of public institutions generally and how its expectations of government expanded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Reading Publics is an important contribution to the history of public libraries and public institutions and of readers and reading in the United States.

Tom Glynn is a librarian at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, in New Brunswick. He is the selector and liaison for British and American history, the history of science, American studies, and political science.