This article was originally written in three parts and published in The Wyoming News Chronicle in the spring of 2023.

Andrew Carnegie, born in Scotland in 1835, emigrated with his parents to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania when he was twelve years old. His life is an almost unbelievable rags-to-riches story. He went from working as a bobbin boy for $1.20 a week to founding the Carnegie Steel Company and becoming one of the richest men in America. 

During the last eighteen years of Carnegie’s life, he devoted himself to spending the greater part of his fortune for “benevolent purposes.” One such purpose was the establishment of libraries across the United States. Eventually, 1,681 libraries were built in this country because of his benevolence. Believing that a community needed to be invested in its own library project, Carnegie gave grants for building libraries with the conditions that the library be free to the public, that the town provide the building site, and annually provide ten percent of the building cost for maintenance.

I knew some of this from high school history classes, but my fascination with Carnegie libraries didn’t begin until many years later when we were living in Thermopolis, Wyoming. Though the Hot Springs County Carnegie Library now houses county offices, the building is still standing. Somehow, in the state with the lowest population in the nation, sixteen Wyoming towns received Carnegie library grants. According to a 2007 article in Wyoming Library Roundup, “Per capita, Wyoming received more money from Carnegie than any other state.” I suspect the need was greater here than in other states because of the long distances between towns. 

Five of Wyoming’s Carnegie library buildings are still standing but no longer belong to the county libraries. Two are now museums, two are being used for county offices, and one is currently empty. Five Wyoming’s Carnegie Libraries are still being used as libraries. **

Libraries have been important enough to Wyoming citizens that many counties already had small libraries before Wyoming became a state. Often, they were founded by city councils or women’s groups, and might be contained in one room in a courthouse. 

What about libraries before Carnegie?

In an article titled, “The Great Library of Alexandria,” Bill Anderson, FRC, writes, “the first recorded public library wasn’t until about the time of Alexander the Great. The philosopher Aristotle, a man of great learning, who was also Alexander’s tutor, amassed a large personal library encompassing all the arts and sciences of his age. Legend has it that when the Ptolemies constructed the Great Library of Alexandria, it was arranged according to Aristotle’s model of his own personal library.” At that time, only a king would have had the resources to amass a library such as the one in Alexandria, thought to have contained nearly 500,000 books (parchment rolls). 

No one is certain when or by whom the Library of Alexandria was destroyed, but it has been deduced that it was in the first few centuries A.D. For the next 1500 years or so, anything resembling a library would have been in a monastery where monks painstakingly copied books by hand (for which I will be eternally grateful), or in collections of the extremely wealthy. These were not open to the public, even supposing John Q were literate. 

A century or two before the concept of public libraries began to take shape, individuals and groups were building subscription libraries. These were collections privately funded by donors or through membership fees. 

In 1731, Benjamin Franklin founded a subscription library now called The Library Company of Philadelphia. It was established by fifty founding members who contributed 40 shillings each and agreed to pay ten shillings per year to maintain membership. According to the Library’s website, “All of the books the Library Company acquired year by year over more than two and a half centuries are still on its shelves, along with many others added since it was transformed into a research library in the 1950s . . . Nonmembers could borrow books by depositing their value as security ‘and paying a small Acknowledgment for the Reading’” (“At the Instance of Benjamin Franklin,” Edwin Wolf, p.3).

In Great Britain in the 1840s, a campaign for a system of public libraries began. There was resistance from the upper classes, some of whom thought the working class was easier to manage when they didn’t have too much education. Others were concerned that the act would infringe on private enterprises. Still others opposed the act on the grounds that it imposed a new tax. The act, which became law in 1850, granted the ability to towns with a population over 10,000 to use tax money to finance libraries – half a penny per pound. Amazingly enough, five years later the act was amended to allow for doubling the permissible rate – one penny per pound. The population limit was cut in half as well, and was abolished completely ten years later.      

When free people believe something ought to be done, they figure out a way to do it. 

Andrew Carnegie’s vision for libraries accessible to everyone was incredibly generous. However, considering his stipulations, where did people imagine the money for books and maintenance would come from, considering that the libraries had to be free to the public? It would require great commitment from individuals in communities or . . . taxes. Has there ever been a public library that admitted half a penny per pound was enough?

And consider, once the people turn over such enterprises to support from taxes, they always lose their say in how those enterprises are conducted. There may be public meetings to placate citizens’ need to voice their opinions, but ultimately, these institutions will be run by a small, elite group who know better than everyman. 

Through a series of extremely fortunate events, over the past nine months or so, I have become acquainted with several women scattered around the country who run private lending libraries. The ones I know are homeschoolers or former homeschoolers who collected good books for their children’s education and edification. At some point each of them began to share books with other families. Along the way they developed their own process. Each has her own method of storing books, cataloging them, shelving them, and lending them. Why do they bother?

In September of 2022,  Sara Masarik, and I interviewed Kathleen Seeger at Plumfield Moms about her lending library in Wisconsin. Speaking of watching old, beautiful books disappear from libraries, she said, “We’re holding some of these beautiful ideas and beautiful books that are just less available, and now we have them all in one place. Perhaps that is some of our modern mind-set, that books are so widely available that we think of all books as having equal value and take that for granted somewhat. It’s important to recognize that there are different values in books. It’s important to steer our children to these books that they think are broccoli but, once you read them, you find out they are better than candy.

“There are many living librarians who do not have everything perfect, and that’s not the point. The point is for these ideas to be shared; for these beautiful books to be available.”

In another interview, Jeannette Tulis, a lending librarian in Tennessee told us, “When my children grew up and left home, I thought ‘I have to do something with these books; I have to be a force for good in my community.’ And I realized that all the books I had were the ones my library didn’t have anymore. That was really eye-opening for me.”

These women are not trying to duplicate the public library any more than homeschoolers are trying to duplicate public school. There is no formula for the “right way” to open your own lending library. It starts with a desire to fill a need. 

You have no doubt been hearing about the controversies in many states involving materials available at public libraries and in schools. We all ought to be jarred out of our comfort zone when we realize we’ve come to a time when some of those we’ve elected to run the institutions most closely involved with our children aren’t clear about what constitutes obscenity and pornography. 

We’ve been so immersed in our current system that we believe we’ve always done it this way. Often, the first response is to hasten to a board meeting expecting to effect reform within the system. That could happen. But we also have the option to repossess our freedoms and reinstitute our institutions.  

If you are interested in finding out more from experienced lending librarians, meet the Plumfield Library Ladies here. 

A brand new resource at biblioguides.com/libraries is a directory of private lending libraries from around the country. 

I recently found an index card in a folder on which I had written, over twenty-five years ago, “I will have a library someday.” Here I am at “someday.” I’m not exactly sure when I’ll be open for “business,” but I’m listening, learning, planning and praying. As far as I know, there is no other private lending library in Wyoming yet. I’m hoping that someday there will be one in each of our 23 counties. 

Are you being called to contribute to this movement in some way? 

** A short “biography” of the Albany County library at this site https://www.historicwyoming.org/carnegielibraries contains this interesting tidbit. 

“The building was expanded in 1927 and remodeled in 1951, and in 1981 it was vacated when the library moved to a new building two blocks away. A human book brigade passed books from hand to hand down the street during the move, an event captured on a video that can be viewed on the library’s web site.” Though the video is no longer available on the web site, a helpful Albany County librarian directed me to search “ACPL on the move” at youtube.com.