Before the Public Library: Reading, Community, and Identity in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850: 61 (Library of the Written Word - the Handpress World)

ISBN 10: 9004348662 / ISBN 13: 9789004348660

Published by Brill Academic Pub, 2017

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Before the Public Library: Reading, Community, and Identity in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850: 61 (Library of the Written Word - the Handpress World)
• Publisher: Brill Academic Pub
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9004348662
• ISBN 13: 9789004348660
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New
• Book Type: book

About this title

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 fostering of sociability, and the building of community-based institutions.

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.