15 - Libraries for sociability: the advance of the subscription library

Summary

The embrace of the new transformed libraries in late Stuart and Hanoverian Britain: the new volume and types of publication, new library founders and entrepreneurs, new library locations and ambitions, new users and readers, new reputations and perceived purposes. More fitful than steady development, the increasing popularity of assembling a collection of books initiated innovative ways of storing, circulating and lending out books. A striking diversity in the forms of library resulted from the different usages, modes of access, private, charitable and commercial objectives, and owners and clientèle. After the Restoration, libraries as places of entertainment and diversion increasingly vied with libraries as repositories of knowledge or ‘arks of learning’, and their development became less predictable. As the library room came to offer new possibilities of social and political interaction, fears grew that irresponsible reading and discussion might not be contained, however well designed the proclaimed objectives or written rules. Just as books or prints were never neutral or passive, so, it was recognised, library collections were not simply static objects confined to ordained spaces and communities.

What was actually done with the books, prints and other items that might constitute a ‘library’ hugely varied between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Indeed we can court confusion by not qualifying the word ‘library’ or by using it too liberally to embrace very different types of institution with very different ideas of the communities and purposes they served. What we might deem ‘sociability’, and the wider interaction between books, people, and the paraphernalia and accoutrements gathered under the roof of a library proved just as varied and volatile.