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Libraries & Culture 41.2 (2006) 258-263



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The Cover

Upper Montclair, New Jersey

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Cover

The Tabard Inn Library of Philadelphia was one segment of a series of entrepreneurial businesses that were the creation of the Canadian-born teacher Seymour Eaton (1859–1919). In Boston, his first American home, he began the Home Study Circle Library, the forerunner of numerous correspondence schools in the United States, [End Page 258] and in 1892 he moved to Philadelphia to take charge of Drexel Institute's commercial and financial department. During his five years at Drexel Eaton wrote a column of newspaper articles syndicated in the United States and eventually developed his home study course into a business concern known as the Library Publishing Company, which was located at 1323 Walnut Street, a few blocks south of City Hall in the heart of Philadelphia. This company also established the Booklovers Library and published its companion enterprise, the Booklovers Magazine, from 1902 to until at least 1905.1 The best description of that subscription library (called "the largest circulating library in the world") is this advertisement: "THE BOOKLOVERS LIBRARY is patronized largely by well-to-do cultured people; people who appreciate clean, attractive books, and who can afford to pay reasonable membership fees."2

What began as the Booklovers Library had expanded by March 1902 to become the Tabard Inn Library, with addresses for its company headquarters at 1030 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia (east of City Hall), and 1611 Chestnut Street (west of City Hall). The Tabard Inn Library drew its name from the Tabard Inn in the Southwark Borough of London, England, from which Chaucer's pilgrims left on their pilgrimage to Canterbury. (A tabard was a short, sleeveless tunic in Chaucer's time, originally emblazoned front and back with a coat of arms.)

The cover of this issue features the most elaborate of the Tabard Inn Library's three known bookplates (11.7 by 8 cm), which is illustrated with an eighteenth-century rendition of Chaucer's Tabard Inn. The bookplate of the Tabard Inn Library's predecessor, the Booklovers Library (9.8 by 7.2 cm), is plainer. These bookplates are now to be found in bookplate collections formed in the twentieth century or very occasionally in a book in the stock of a twenty-first-century used bookstore. The Library of Congress holds eighty-eight volumes of Tabard Inn Library materials.

The Tabard Inn Library's books were assigned categories that by 1904 included Japan, Russia, and Korea; biographies and memoirs; travel and description; politics and history; economics and sociology; domestic economy and recreation; religious thought; criticism, anecdote, and essays; science and nature study; juvenile books; and the newest fiction. The Tabard Inn Library's book selection policy was described in its advertisement:

It is a library exclusively of new books. When a book is a year old it is withdrawn and sold for whatever it will bring. If a book is not popular, it is taken off the list in six months; sometimes in three months. There is no better guide to what the American people are [End Page 259] reading than the "Booklovers" monthly catalogue. This catalogue rarely has more than three hundred titles, if a book is dropped within a year it is sure evidence that it is dead. If a new book is not listed, the editors are convinced that few would read it.3

The Tabard Inn Library included works by the novelists Irving Bacheller, Winston Churchill, Joseph Conrad, Marie Corelli, John Galsworthy, Hamlin Garland, Ellen Glasgow, Joel Chandler Harris, Lawrence Housman, W. H. Hudson, Jerome K. Jerome, Joseph C. Lincoln, Jack London, George Horace Lorimer, George Barr McCutcheon, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Thomas Nelson Page, Myrtle Reed, H. G. Wells, Edith Wharton, Stewart Edward White, and Kate Douglas Wiggin.


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Figure 1
The bookplate for the Booklovers Library.

Although the home offices of the Booklovers Library and the Tabard Inn Library were in central Philadelphia, the Tabard Inn Library units were composed of about fifteen hundred "stations," as they were [End Page 260] called...

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