Cambridge History of Libraries

The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland. Vol 2: 1640-1850. Ed. Giles Mandelbrote and K.A. Manley. Cambridge UP, 2008. Web.

The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland. Vol 3: 1850-2000. Ed. Alistair Black and Peter Hoare. Cambridge UP, 2008. Web.

Vol 2 1640-1850

Introduction

Giles Mandelbrote / K.A. Manley

• 1 The variety of library facilities available to the man (and woman)...of the mid c19 was becoming bewilderingly diffuse.
  • all tastes and communities
  • All classes read, wether for amusement or instruction, and at all possible opportunities
    • compare to Altick 1957
• By 1850 any person could borrow any kind of literature and read it in his (or indeed her) own domestic space, or use an institutional library and socialise with like-minded people. The scholar enjoyed far better facilities than ever before.
  • D'Israeli: "The reading-room of the British Museum, in which diggers and miners now congregate with a zeal and numer- ical strength rivalled only by the better rewarded groups assembling about Californian rocks and rivers, was, 60 years since, the peaceful and unknown retreat of some half-dozen pious souls, unwilling that the memorable deeds and fruitful lives of generations dead and gone should pass away from the earth unregistered and unbeloved."
• 3 The C18 saw many advances...widening of access, growth in collections and the development of new models of library provision... By the early C19, two key themes are first the increasing establishment of libraries "for the people"...as well as libraries for the privileged...and the consolidation of national reference collections for scholars[.]
  • circulation libraries, mechanics' institutes, and proprietary subscription libraries on the former, the Bodleian and the British Museum on the latter
• ...Marked shift in the history of personal libraries, in terms of the extension of personal book ownership at many levels of society, the growth of formally organised sales of books, with printed catalogues, and the fashionable development of book-collecting.
• 4 legal deposit came de facto to the BM with the Royal Library in 1757, but that wasn't law until 1842 -- impt for the BM's sense of itself as an institution with imperial role
• 5 Public libraries, as we know them today, did not exist before 1850.
• Method of edited collection: "social history of a vital movement in British cultural history"

Libraries in Context 1750-1850

Joanna Innes

• 287 The most pervasive force driving social change in this period [moreso she argues than industrialization and urbanization] was population growth.... The effects of population growht were shaped by the ways in which it interacted with economic growth.
  • Britain/Ireland pop increased 3x 8 million to 27 million in 1750-1850
• 288 Libraries reflect continued ascendency of landed classes, e.g., "centrality of the library in the design and life of country houses"
• 289 libraries for the "literate working classes" a development of the 1820s and after
• 291 On the supply side, libraries had two chief sources of material: new publications, and recycled older items. The mix between newer and older acquisitions varied between libraries.

292ff social development of libraries: steadily links the development of small and institutional libraries ("forms of libraries" 293) to new trends in education, including commercial schools and programmes of lectures/independent reading, alongside new urban recomposition of "monuments to national benevolence" in the mid-C18: Foundling Hospital, Marine Society, BM, Royal Academy (295), as well as new associative tendencies (book clubs, subscription libraries for subcultures), "the commercialisation of leisure" (296), and the new interest in diffusing Christian knowledge

• 297: that is to say, the development of libraries hooks into the "associative and commercial developments" that constitute "the expansion of the public sphere" (Habermas 1969) - the theme of "public" benefit thus impt
• political/ethical contexts for libraries
  • 298 circulating libraries important in "diatribes against the reading of novels," especially by women -- critique of idleness and morbid, frenzied sensibility
  • also a worry that "libraries would fuel theological and political controversy" if municipal libraries were established -- though the were in a small way in 1850

The First Century of the British Library

P.R. Harris

Vol 3

Circulating Libraries in the Victorian Age and After

Simon Eliot

• 125: Subscription libraries vs. circulating: subscription tended to evolve out of private c18 book clubs; high annual subscription fees; required readers to take a share; non-fiction collecting focus
  • Circulating: yearly but also short or seasonal rates (for poor areas or holiday destinations); some charged by volume borrowed; general in content with reference works
• "It is no coincidence that circulating libraries and the novel rose together."
• 126 Often stationers or other businesses also had a circulating library type business appended on (as did the pharmacist Boots, as I read somewhere -- he discusses it 142ff)
• 127 hard for circ libraries to generate a profit enough to be stand-alone in part because serving 2 sorts of customer: those looking to read the "latest fashionable and popular books" and those wanting to read canonical works
  • smaller circ libraries tended to stock more canonical works, e.g., 40-60% for libraries with 2-3k titles, 70-90% for libraries with >500 (cites Moretti Atlas)
• specialist cir libraries: a scientific/technical book library, a music library
  • source seems to be city directories
• 129 a consistent and growing subscriber base vital to business
• 129-30 the other side of the coin for Mudie's: they were arbiters of taste and dictated the price for triple-decker novels, but their costs were high. Even when they could negotiate a discount, which they frequently did, "many copies were not circulated for long enough to make much of a profit, even at a discount. The big libraries therefore turned themselves into second-hand book dealers selling on stock at significantly reduced prices."
  • often stock sold onto smaller/provincial libaries
• "In the c19 books, like clothes, went through many owners as they steadily descended the socio-economic ladder."
• 131 fears of moral contagion (with books by Reade, Meredith, and Moore, which Mudie banned) but also physical: Mudie's dictated that users who had contagious diseases must submit a doctor's certificate and not return potentially infected books
• circulating libraries were successful 1) because they'd been around since the C18 and the book trade as conservative, but moreover 2) books were quite expensive after the Napoleonic period
• 132 Mudie's was closed stacks, with queues by subscriber last name, and the latest technology for library assistants behind the scenes (lifts, speaking tubes)
• 133 Mudie's successful because of innovative distribution system, low annual subscription rate (1 guinea), its "selection" of morally acceptable books, and wide advertising
• 134 worth noting that Mudie's stocked more non-fiction than fiction throughout the period, approaching a 50-50 split by the 1890s (interestingly also when the triple-decker was declining)
• 135-6 over the period Mudie's and other circ libraries found it harder and harder to make a profit from triple-deckers especially as 1 vol reprints became widespread
• "uncirculating and unsellable novels" accumulated in "the Catacombs" in the basement of Mudie's
• 137 at pains to make the Mudies/triple-decker relationship more complex, arguing that the single-volume work of fiction "was, in fact, a very significant presence in the catalogues from the very beginning"
• 141 not necessarily a causal relationship but "It is not insignificant that it was in the decade following the establishment of [W.H.] Smith's Library that publishers began to issue one volume cheap reprints of three-decker novels soon after the first edition." I.e., 1860s
  • WH Smith's success in part derived from the ease of distribution since their bookstalls were already in train stations

The British Museum Library 1857-1973

P.R. Harris