Before the Public Library: Reading, Community and Identity in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850

Erscheinungsjahr 2017
ISBN: 978-90-04-34866-0
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 61, 418 Seiten, Format (B × H): 163 mm x 241 mm, Gewicht: 998 g

Reihe: Library of the Written Word

Before the Public Library explores the emergence of community-based lending libraries in the Atlantic World before the advent of the Public Library movement in the mid-nineteenth century. Essays by eighteen scholars from a range of disciplines seek to place, for the first time, community libraries within an Atlantic context over a two-century period. Taking a comparative approach, this volume shows that community libraries played an important – and largely unrecognized – role in shaping Atlantic social networks, political and religious movements, scientific and geographic knowledge, and economic enterprise. Libraries had a distinct role to play in shaping modern identities through the acquisition and circulation of specific kinds of texts, the fostering of sociability, and the building of community-based institutions.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Towsey, Mark

Roberts, Kyle B.

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Bibliothekswesen, Informationswissenschaften Buchgeschichte, Bibliotheksgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors

Introduction
Mark Towsey and Kyle B. Roberts

Part 1: Empire and Enlightenment
1 Building Religious Communities with Books: The Quaker and Anglican Transatlantic Libraries, 1650–1710
Louisiane Ferlier
2 Poetry and Civic Urbanism in the Coffee-House Library in the Mid-eighteenth Century
Markman Ellis
3 Of Mudfish, Harpsichords and Books: Libraries and Community in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica
April G. Shelford
4 Affleck Generations: The Libraries of the Boswells of Auchinleck, 1695–1825
James J. Caudle
5 Sedition, Revolution and Libertinism in Eighteenth-Century Brazil: The Library of Naturalist José Vieira Couto
Júnia Ferreira Furtado

Part 2: Revolution and Nation Building
6 Uncommon Knowledge: Late Eighteenth-Century American Subscription Library Collections
Cheryl Knott
7 Reading Sheffield: Sheffield Libraries and Book Clubs, 1771–1850
Sue Roe and Loveday Herridge
8 Challenging Institutional Ambitions: The Practice of Book Exchanges at the New York Society Library, 1789–1795
Rob Koehler
9 A “Quaint Corner” of the Reading Nation: Romantic Readerships in Rural Perthshire, 1780–1830
Katie Halsey

Part 3: Institutionalisation and Expansion
10 From Private Devotion to “Public” Education: Northern Dissenting Academy Libraries and Their Benefactors
Rachel Eckersley
11 The Foundation of Plymouth Public Library: Cultural Status, Philanthropy and Expanding Readerships, 1810–1825
Annika Bautz
12 Reading on the Edge of the Atlantic: The Easton Library Company
Christopher Phillips
13 Crafting Respectability: The Politics of Class at the Mechanic Apprentices’ Library of Boston
Lynda K. Yankaskas

Part 4: Public Libraries
14 Reading Publics: Books, Communities and Readers in the Early History of American Public Libraries
Tom Glynn
15 From Voluntary to State Action: Samuel Smiles, James Silk Buckingham and the Rise of the Public Library Movement in Britain
Alistair Black

Bibliography of Secondary Works
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Mark Towsey PhD (2007), University of St Andrews, is Reader in Modern British History and Director of the Eighteenth-Century Worlds Research Centre at the University of Liverpool.

Kyle B. Roberts PhD (2007), University of Pennsylvania, is Associate Professor of Public History and New Media in the History Department and Director of the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities at Loyola University Chicago.