![]() ![]() Founded generally by philanthropists, these early “public libraries” aimed to preserve knowledge and make it publicly available to scholars and clergymen – but with little expectation that ordinary people would have any desire or need to use their books. The earliest ‘public’ libraries were founded in Norwich in 1608, Ipswich in 1612 and in Bristol in 1613, the latter in a building donated to the city for the purpose by Bristol merchant Robert Redwood and supplemented subsequently by books bequeathed by Bristol-born Tobias Mathew, Archbishop of York. ![]() As we shall see, these collections often included parliamentary records and history.Ĭertain kinds of library were already reasonably familiar in British towns of the mid eighteenth century. Inspired on the one hand by rising literacy rates and the increasing cultural capital of reading amongst the middling sort, and on the other by the continuing high price of new books, the subscription library was essentially a book club which allowed members to pool their resources to acquire a larger permanent collection of books than any of them could afford individually. The Lending Library, by Isaac Cruikshank, between 18.
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