The Mother of All Libraries

by David Safier

OK, the headline is a bit of a cheat. “The Mother of All Libraries” isn’t a boast by Saddam Hussein about his book collection in Baghdad. It actually refers to the public subscription library Ben Franklin set up in Philadelphia when he was a young man. (You can stop reading now if you wish.)

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I’ve been receiving The Autobiography of Ben Franklin in 800 word email installments courtesy of Dailylit.com. I just read a section about how Franklin’s thirst for books led him to create the first subscription library in the colonies.

Books were ridiculously expensive in those days, so young men like Franklin could only afford a few. He and some friends pooled their books together, but it still wasn’t enough to suit him. So he came up with this plan:

Each subscriber [was] engag’d to pay a certain sum down for the first purchase of books, and an annual contribution for increasing them. So few were the readers at that time in Philadelphia, and the majority of us so poor, that I was not able, with great industry, to find more than fifty persons, mostly young tradesmen, willing to pay down for this purpose forty shillings each, and ten shillings per annum. On this little fund we began. The books were imported; the library wag opened one day in the week for lending to the subscribers, on their promissory notes to pay double the value if not duly returned.

Other towns imitated his idea and created libraries of their own. Soon, the common folks in the colonies “were observ’d by strangers to be better instructed and more intelligent than people of the same rank generally are in other countries.”

Franklin’s innovation was a major educational advance, bringing books to people who couldn’t afford to buy them, and it’s one of the reasons, along with the spread of schools, that European visitors to the U.S. well into the mid-nineteenth century marveled at seeing people reading on the streets and discussing political matters as if they knew what they were talking about.

As for my headline: I didn’t make it up. I took it from Franklin himself. “This,” he wrote about his innovation, “was the mother of all the North American subscription libraries.” Take that, Saddam Hussein!