Books, Buildings and Social Engineering: Early Public Libraries in Britain from Past to Present

This is a monumental book about a monumental subject and an important addition to our understanding of the public library as a form of building and as a social phenomenon. The book takes the reader through three periods of public libraries – civic, endowed, national network – and then provides three thematic studies – open access, children's libraries, and monument and machine – before concluding with an assessment of some post‐war and contemporary library designs. The whole is supplemented by a gazetteer of early public library buildings in Britain 1850‐1940, and profusely illustrated in black and white. There is much to digest, as well as many tantalising windows into areas of further research.

The passing of the Public Libraries Act in 1850 is implicitly taken as the starting point for this work though the exploitation of the earlier (1845) Museums Act, which allowed local authorities to create libraries attached to museums, is not overlooked. The first libraries, which appeared in what is designated the civic period by the authors, reflected the development of ideas about what a building should contain, how it should be organised, and how it should look, which inevitably created tensions between librarians, architects, and civic leaders. The segmentation of libraries into functional areas (reference rooms, reading rooms, games rooms, stacks, etc.) was gradually refined and the authors highlight that this was often extended into social segregation: rooms for workers, juveniles, and women were common, though counter‐intuitively women's rooms required extra supervision with “mutilation of papers, particularly those containing fashion plates, being far too common”. This gradual evolution in library design is well documented and is picked up in later chapters where library design alters to reflect changing values and policies.

The second period of public libraries – endowed – is one in which philanthropy, primarily that of industrial magnates, considerably extended the provision of public libraries. The best known of these philanthropists is Andrew Carnegie, whose first donation paid for the building of a public library in his hometown of Dunfermline. The site was that of the former Abbey Brewery and had been bought for £2000 in 1875 for a new public hall. The building included a librarian's residence and one wonders how many other libraries there were in which the librarian lived above the shop (a plan of the Castleford library on page 52 shows a flat and I know of similar accommodation in Stirling and Larbert). Importantly, the authors give due recognition to the donations made by other, perhaps less familiar, names such as Thomas Nelson, Henry Tate, and Passmore Edwards. The authors also highlight the double‐edged sword of such endowments which, while charitable in nature, could be uncharitably linked to a primary desire to commemorate the individual. Many endowments burdened the local authorities with large and recurrent costs for maintenance and debt service charges leading Berwick Sayers to query the commitment to bricks and mortar, rather than to the provision of books.

In the discussion of the third period of public libraries – national network – the authors take the reader from the First World War, up to the outbreak of the second. There were different priorities both during and between the wars but new technologies and new ideas did find expression in a number of major library buildings. The contribution of Stanley Jast is given extensive coverage, in particular his ideas on the location and orientation of book stacks to service the reading rooms, and his proposals for the creation of specialist libraries within a library complex (e.g. music library, commercial library, and rare books collection). Intriguingly, Jast referred to the notion of a “library grid” a web of libraries in which “separate collections in many buildings [would] […] merge into one great library, housed in many centres, but functioning for all practical purposes as a unit”. This complements the ideas of Paul Otlet who talked of a world in which all information would be stored as it was created and would be accessible remotely from a repository and projected onto a screen. These, we should remember with pride were library/information scientists working in the 1930s who arguably had the vision of a digital library and world wide web before either Bush and Berners‐Lee.

The three thematic chapters are interesting in that they draw together themes which are touched upon in the chronological assessment. The first, on open access, charts the shift in terms of allowing readers direct access to the books they wished to consult. This was driven by scale, professional thinking, and technical developments. The adoption of the Dewey Decimal Classification system allowed for more logical arrangement of books and a more efficient way of being directed to a particular item in ever growing collections. The role of James Duff Brown in promoting this change of policy, one in which the reader might be trusted, is clearly explained and analysed. The provision of special services for children is the other major theme and takes the reader from the unexpectedly early date of 1857, through to the point where such services were the norm and where consideration was given not only to stock but to the environment within which it was consulted.

The gazetteer is a useful appendix but it is the section that is easiest to criticise as it can be tested and inevitably it has gaps. Although a searchable database is promised, there is no indication of where that might be accessed or how the wider profession might help to add to it. As an information scientist, I would have wished to have had a clearer set of criteria for inclusion as these would have helped rationalise why several potential candidates in the counties nearest to me were not recorded; for instance, the Coalsnaughton Public Hall and Library (1907 – John S Leishman); the Dunblane Institute (1907 – which had its own librarian, turned down a Carnegie offer, and became the public library); the Smith Art Gallery and Museum (1872 – which had a public reading room for the benefit of the inhabitants of Stirling, Dunblane and Kinbuck, and whose collections were moved to a Carnegie funded building in 1904); the public reading room and Library in St Andrews (which was funded by the Social Service Council); and there are others. No doubt some of these can be excluded or are on the fringes but without the criteria it is hard to make a firm decision. There are also a few obvious mistakes: Larbert and Stenhousemuir lie close to each other but the Dobbie Library is in the former not the latter; on the other hand, Newburgh is some distance from Cupar and the Laing Museum and Library is very definitely in the former. However, these are small criticisms of a fascinating book that will be useful to library historians and modern day planners alike.