Collecting Contested Titles: The Experience of Five Small Public Libraries in the Rural Midwest, 1893-1956

This essay is an analysis of the history of how, when, and if five small public libraries in the rural Midwest acquired ten controversial books published between 1885 and 1951. My research is extracted from a database that records all titles obtained by these five libraries over an eighty-year period. It also incorporates analysis of when these titles appeared (or did not appear) in acquisitions guides like Fiction Catalog and Standard Catalog for Public Libraries and notes which of these guides were purchased by the five libraries. I conclude that the collections of each of these five libraries tended to reflect the cultural values systems of the local elites who ran them.