The $66.84 That Built the Public Library

On April 9, 1833, the citizens of Peterborough, New Hampshire, gathered for a town meeting and voted to spend $66.84, about $2,600 today, on books. The funds would come from the town’s share of the state’s Literary Fund, which New Hampshire distributed out of a tax on banks.

From that small allocation, in a town of fewer than two thousand people in the hill country of southern New Hampshire, would come the first library in America, and perhaps even the world, established from its first day as a free, tax-supported public institution that was owned by the town, paid for by taxes, and open to everyone by right.

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For most of the history of libraries, books were kept largely under strict guard. The great library at Alexandria, the largest collection of the ancient world, stood within a royal complex and served only scholars approved by the Greek kings of Egypt. In China, where written records dated back thousands of years, book collections belonged to emperors or powerful families. In medieval Europe, monasteries, universities, and cathedrals kept their books in heavy wooden cabinets called armaria, which only the librarian could open. The books that came out of these cabinets were chained to desks when being read. In some libraries, librarians even locked readers inside iron alcoves while they read, lest they walk out with a book.

As the printing press finally broke the scarcity of books in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, libraries began to multiply. But the principle of restricted access did not change quickly. Those cracks in the library structure finally emerged in the eighteenth century as subscription and pay-to-rent libraries began to appear — the first, believed to be, in Edinburgh in 1725, then Benjamin Franklin’s in Philadelphia in 1731, and a long line after. This was an important shift, as anyone who could pay the annual fee could join and borrow books. But the fee meant a significant constraint remained, as only some could afford the payment.

By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a few American towns had begun to go further. In 1790, Benjamin Franklin sent 116 books to the town that bore his name in Massachusetts, which were made available to all of the people free of charge. In Dublin, New Hampshire, in 1822, two townsmen founded a library free to everyone in town, kept at first in a room of the local tavern and supported by voluntary contributions.

These were genuine steps that helped increase access to books. But each rested still on something prior, whether a donor’s gift, or a private library the town agreed to prop up.

Then came Peterborough.