London's Public Libraries

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GREAT LARGE ROUND BRASS SUNDIAL COMPASS, HATTON GARDEN LONDON
13 May 2012 at 7:13am
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Sterling Salt Spoon London England 1787-88 John Wren
11 May 2012 at 7:17am
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Arthur H. Beavan continued his survey of libraries in London in Imperial London, published in 1901, with this look at public libraries:

Almost every borough in London has now its Public Library, the initiation of many of them being due to the munificence of Mr. Passmore Edwards, who only last year laid the foundation stone of the new Public Library for the parish of St Mary, Stratford-at-Bow, that is to bear his name.

Bow, which is about to be included in the new borough of Poplar, has a population of about 50,000, the majority of whom are factory-workers.

As the Vestry had not enough money to construct the library, Mr. Edwards generously offered £4000, which was accepted.

At St. George's-in-the-East, the losses, out of an issue of 40,878, have been one volume, value 2s. 4d., borrowed from the Lending Library by a ratepayer who removed from the parish and took the book with him; another, value 1s. 4d., taken from the Reference Department by a reader who gave a false address; and two volumes, worth 2s. each, from the boys' room, supposed to have been taken from the case by juvenile frequenters.

The Camberwell Libraries Committee report that with an issue of more than half-a-million volumes during the past year, representing an average turnover of ten times per volume of the stock, there were but nine volumes unrecovered.

At one of the Metropolitan Libraries this deficiency was temporarily supplied by a bookbinder, to the bewilderment of frequenters of the institution.

By some mischance a number of books of the same size became possessed of the wrong backs.

Thus, one lady who wished to peruse East Lynne, received a book with that title on the cover, but which was really an odd volume of Cudworth's Intellectual System of the Universe, while a working-man, anxious to pass a pleasant hour with one of Stanley Weyman's romances, found himself confronted with Hegel's Phaenomenology of the Spirit.

Next: The Social Regeneration of 1900 London: Philanthropic London