by Jim Green, Library Company of Philadelphia
From the 1730s to the 1760s, all American circulating libraries were subscription libraries. They were owned and supported by private individual shareholders, who could borrow books so long as they paid their annual subscription dues. Some were also open to the general public for reference, and some, like the Library Company of Philadelphia, even had provisions for non-shareholders to borrow books upon payment of a cash deposit.
In the 1760s, a new type of library suddenly appeared: commercial circulating libraries. These were individually owned—generally by booksellers—and patrons could borrow books for a modest fee. Because their owners were entrepreneurs who hoped to turn a profit, they tended to reach out to the public by advertisement, by making their premises inviting especially to women, and by stocking the most current and popular books. In towns where there was already a well-established subscription library, these new libraries appealed to readers who could not afford or did not have the social position to join a subscription library. They offered a different type of reading material and a different type of reading experience.
There is no direct evidence of outright competition for readers between these two types of library, but indirect evidence can be found in changes that occurred in subscription libraries at the exact times and places where commercial circulating libraries began to flourish. In both Philadelphia and New York, the two cities where commercial and subscription libraries were in dynamic relationship, the advantages enjoyed by the commercial libraries were many. They offered more new books, more light reading (especially more novels), longer opening hours, lower costs to borrowers, convenient locations, and access for women and young people.
Subscription libraries tried to emulate commercial libraries in each of those areas, but because of the need to maintain and preserve permanent reference collections, they could not go nearly as far in making their collections accessible to all. On the other hand, the weakness of commercial libraries was their very impermanence, their structural inability to renew their collections or sustain themselves for more than a few years in a period when all commercial enterprises were precarious and economic downturns were frequent. Even this weakness, however, implied a kind of strength: it was easy for any bookseller with a substantial stock to start up a new commercial library and make a go of it for at least a few years. Thus, in both cities, no commercial library lasted more than a few years, but new ones kept popping up. Meanwhile the subscription libraries had to consolidate and become more like commercial libraries, but they endured. Moreover, in both cases they were able to function effectively as their cities’ de facto public libraries until the mid-19th century even though they remained private institutions, precisely because the competition with commercial libraries had made them more accessible to people of moderate income, to women and children, and to the growing number of readers who read not only to become learned, virtuous, or polite, but also to have fun.
Click here to read the full article, as published in Institutions of Reading : The Social Life of Libraries in the United States; edited by Thomas Augst and Kenneth Carpenter. Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 2007.