Before the Public Library (Library of the Written Word - the Handpress World, 61) - Hardcover

Towsey Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9004348662 ISBN 13: 9789004348660

Publisher: BRILL, 2017

Synopsis

"Before the Public Library explores the emergence of community-based lending libraries in the Atlantic World before the advent of the Public Library movement in the mid-nineteenth century. Essays by eighteen scholars from a range of disciplines seek to place, for the first time, community libraries within an Atlantic context over a two-century period. Taking a comparative approach, this volume shows that community libraries played an important - and largely unrecognized - role in shaping Atlantic social networks, political and religious movements, scientific and geographic knowledge, and economic enterprise. Libraries had a distinct role to play in shaping modern identities through the acquisition and circulation of specific kinds of texts, the fosteringof sociability, and the building of community-based institutions"--

About this title

About the Author

Mark Towsey PhD (2007), University of St Andrews, is Reader in Modern British History and Director of the Eighteenth-Century Worlds Research Centre at the University of Liverpool.

Kyle B. Roberts PhD (2007), University of Pennsylvania, is Associate Professor of Public History and New Media in the History Department and Director of the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities at Loyola University Chicago.

Review

"This is a significant book and deserves to be widely read. Its chapters are ably argued and impressively researched. Major themes recur such as ideas of community libraries and the place of libraries in local and national identity, while the thorny question of fiction is well-rehearsed."
Keith Manley, in: Library & Information History, Vol. 34, No. 3 (2018), pp. 184-185.

"Towsey and Roberts's undertaking is unique and sets a new standard for historical exploration of library history. Without hesitation, I recommend thus important book for all libraries whose mission is to support and maintain access to quality research."
Edward A. Goedeken, Iowa State University. In: Libraries: Culture, History, and Society, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2019), 121-123.

Edition details

• Publisher: BRILL
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 9004348662
• ISBN 13: 9789004348660
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 436