Main Street Public Library: Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 1876-956

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. See, for example, Deanna Marcum, Good Books in a Country Home: The Public Library as a Cultural Force in Hagerstown, Maryland, 1878–1920 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994); and Ronald E. Bergquist, “‘It Could Have Been Bigger, But Its Residents Like It as It Is’: Small Town Libraries in Moore County, North Carolina” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006). 2. My original study included the Morris Public Library of Morris, Illinois, but because analysis of its history proved so similar to that of Sage Library, it was not included in this book. For coverage of Morris, see “‘An Established Institution’: The Morris Public Library of Morris, Illinois, 1913–1953,” Journal of Illinois History 13 (Winter 2010). 3. Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (New York: New American Library, 1961), quotes taken from pp. 128, 129, and 257. Can the connections between William Cullen Bryant’s poem “Thanatopisis,” Lewis’s use of the Bryant Library as a youth, and the women’s club Lewis named the “Thanatopsis Society” in Main Street be coincidental? 4. About the “library faith,” see also Oliver Garceau, The Public Library in the Political Process (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 50–51. 5. See Leonard S. Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 32–70; and Jacalyn Eddy, Bookwomen: Creating an Empire in Children’s Book Publishing, 1919–1939 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 30–48. 6. See the author’s “The American Public Library: Construction of a Community Reading institution,” in A History of the Book in America, Volume 4: Print in Motion; The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940, ed. Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 431–51; and his “The Structure of Librarianship: Essay on an Information Profession,” Canadian Journal of Library and Information Studies 24 (April 1999): 17–37. 7. ALA began publishing Booklist as a monthly in 1905; it has served public library professionals ever since. Other ALA selection guides used for this study include: U.S. Bureau of Education, Catalog of “A.L.A.” Library: 5,000 Volumes for a Popular Library Selected by the American Library Association (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1893); Melvil Dewey, ed., A.L.A. Catalog: 8,000 Volumes for a Public Library, withNotes(Washington,DC:GovernmentPrintingOffice,1904);ElvaL.Bascom,ed., A.L.A. Catalog, 1904–1911. Class List: 3,000 Titles for a Popular Library with Notes and Indexes (Chicago: American Library Association, 1912); A.L.A. Catalog, 1912–1921: An 188 • notes to pages 4–5 Annotated List of 4,000 Books (Chicago: American Library Association, 1926); Marion Horton, ed., A.L.A. Catalog, 1926–1931: An Annotated List of Approximately 3,000 Titles (Chicago: American Library Association, 1933); Marion Horton, ed., A.L.A. Catalog, 1937–1941: An Annotated List of Approximately 4,000 Titles (Chicago: American Library Association, 1943); and Florence Boochever, ed., A.L.A. Catalog, 1942–1949: An Annotated List of Approximately 4,500 Titles (Chicago: American Library Association, 1952). Wilson Company guides used for this study include: English Prose Fiction: A Selected List of About 800 Titles Cataloged by Author and Title with Annotations (Minneapolis: H. W. Wilson, 1908); Fiction Catalog: A Selected List of about 350 Novels, Cataloged by Author and Title with Annotations (Minneapolis : H. W. Wilson, 1909); Standard Catalog Series: Fiction Catalog: A Selected List of About 2,000 titles Cataloged by Author and Title with Annotations (Minneapolis: H. W. Wilson, 1913); Corinne Bacon, comp., Standard Catalog for Public Libraries: Fiction Section, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1931); Minnie Earl Sears et al., comps., Standard Catalog for Public Libraries, 1934 Edition: An Annotated List of 11,700 Titles with a Full Analytical Index (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1934); Dorothy E. Cook and Dorothy H. West, comps., Standard Catalog for Public Libraries, 1949 Edition : An Annotated List of 12,000 Titles with Full Analytical Index (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1949); Dorothy H. West and Estelle A. Fidell, comps., Standard Catalog for Public Libraries, 4th Edition, 1958: A Classified & Annotated List of 7,610 Non-Fiction Books Recommended for Public & College Libraries, with a Full Analytical Index (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1959); Dorothy E. Cook and Isabel Stevenson Monro, comps., Fiction Catalog, 1941 Edition: A Subject, Author, and Title List of 5,050 Works of Fiction in the English...