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

Five: Literature Suitable for a Small Public Library: Main Street Public Library Collections

C h a p t e r f i v e Literature Suitable for a Small Public Library Main Street Public Library Collections T he cultural politics of public libraries are written in the collections they acquire. To evaluate those politics, I created a database of the entire inventory of the four midwestern libraries described in this book, based on bibliographic information systematically entered into accessions books through 1970. As previous chapters show, by 1901 the Main Street public library had become a local institution of cultural authority meeting a particular set of expectations and needs. For example, all had sets of encyclopedias, several dictionaries, and a variety of handbooks. For current information, all subscribed to a variety of middle-class general interest periodicals, local newspapers, and at least one state or regional newspaper.1 All also provided access to canonical Western literature—often in the form of compendiums like Library of the World’s Best Literature series. Developing book collections, however, was a community endeavor requiring compromise between three groups who in unobtrusive ways mediated decisions about what kinds of books they wanted on library shelves. One group existed outside the community: the library profession (and its many literary establishment allies) used its self-assumed power to recommend against certain titles and for others through a growing number of collection guides and periodicals. The other two were local groups. One consisted of trustees representing local community leaders who used their influence to select, project, and on rare occasions enforce a set of community cultural and literary values.2 The other consisted of library patrons who used their power to choose from the pool of possibilities made available to them. This group exercised significant influence on the contours of collections, primarily because its members were the source of the cir- 134 • suitable literature culation rates against which public libraries were routinely measured for community value—but used those libraries voluntarily. Always this community influence on public library collections was a balancing act, and because the three groups influencing collections routinely compromised quietly, seldom did the mediation process result in public battles. Instead it took the form of rules, regulations, and service conventions—like rental collections—that evolved into sets of expectations. Some were common to all four libraries, some were unique to each. This chapter analyzes these collections against a larger world of print culture. Turn-of-the-Century Collections Pioneering work has already been done on one Main Street library. In Reading on the Middle Border, Christine Pawley compares an Osage Library Association catalog of 1876 with the contents of the Sage Library in 1893. Fiction accounted for 42 percent in the former, 48 percent in the latter , history 44 percent in the former, 46 percent in the latter. Most surprisingly , however, science accounted for 10 percent in the former, 5 percent in the latter; and of the latter, one-third had been inherited from the former. This would suggest that Sage Library selectors did not place high value on providing up-to-date scientific information, and Pawley’s accompanying analysis of circulation records demonstrates that patrons used the library for scientific information very slightly. Pawley also used extant circulation records for the years 1890–1895 and matched them against census records and a database she compiled from the Sage Library’s accessions books to discern who read what when. For this five-year period she discovered that two-thirds of the library’s users were female, nearly 60 percent were between the ages of ten and thirty, and the vast majority came from Osage’s socially well-positioned citizens. Nearly two-thirds were either Methodist or Congregationalist; Catholics and Lutherans accounted for less than 5 percent. At the same time, however, her research revealed not only heavy use by several Osage citizens who did not fit this profile (including Scandinavian immigrants, working-class Lutherans and Catholics, and widows living with their children ), but also a reading population of old people who frequently read stories written for youth, youth who read stories written for adults, men who read stories written for women (and vice versa), and family members who read the same stories together and individually. Although the Sage public library collections • 135 Library acquired collections largely to please a user group whose reading interests frequently differed from publishers’ and authors’ perceptions of targeted audiences, patrons outside that user group who were equally independent in their reading...