Libraries, Booksellers, and Readers: Changing Tastes at the New York Society Library in the Long Eighteenth Century

Abstract

This paper examines the acquisitions records of the New York Society Library, which include correspondence between the Library and booksellers, receipts, lists of books purchased or needed, and records of trustee meetings, in order to ascertain how the Library established policies for acquiring books, and how these may have changed over time. It argues that, as membership of the Library increased, collection practices changed, and did so with the intent of appealing to and pleasing a broader subset of readers, in part to stabilize the Library’s financial position. Coupled with data from the Library’s surviving circulation records, which date from 1789 to 1792 and from 1799 to 1806, these bookseller records provide insight into the information-seeking behaviours of readers, and how the Library worked to meet the dual demands of entertaining and informing. The Library’s goal — getting the most in-demand contemporary works at the lowest cost — was a necessary one as the cultural landscape shifted and competitor libraries came into existence. Even as the Society Library held to the principle of supplying readers with intellectually useful books, the acquisitions records show that, as its members’ tastes changed, the Library had to evolve in order to attract and keep members, and so fulfil its financial commitments.

Keywords:

• New York Society Library
• colonial New York City
• subscription libraries
• circulation records
• acquisition records
• eighteenth-century novels

Notes

1. In addition to primary documents, two early twentieth-century books recount the history of the New York Society Library: Austin Baxter Keep’s History of the New York Society Library (New York: Printed for the Trustees by the De Vinne Press, 1908), and Marion King’s much livelier Books and People: Five Decades of New York’s Oldest Library (New York: Macmillan, 1954). Many of the early records were rediscovered by King in 1937 as the Society Library moved from its home on University Place to 53 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075, the location of all manuscript material cited in this article.

2. Keep, pp. 201–04.

3. T. Glynn, ‘The New York Society Library: Books, Authority, and Publics in Colonial and Early Republican New York’, Libraries and Culture, 40.4 (2009), 493–529. Glynn highlights the Library’s slow growth during the early and mid-nineteenth century, particularly in comparison to other social libraries such as the Apprentices Library and the Mercantile Library Association. In 1794, the Library had 965 shareholders. ‘This was only 155 less than the number of subscribers in 1842, by which time the city’s population had increased almost tenfold.’ Ibid., p. 516.

4. See <http://nysoclib.org/collection/ledger/circulation-records-1789–1792/people> [accessed 6 April 2015]. Another useful database in development at the American Antiquarian Society, the Database of the Early American Book Trades, will help to deepen our understanding of the relations between booksellers and their customers. See <http://www.americanantiquarian.org/printers-file> [accessed 31 March 2015].

5. K. E. Carpenter, ‘Libraries’, in A History of the Book in America, ii: An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society In the New Nation, 1790–1840, ed. by Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), pp. 273–86 (p. 274). See also J. Green, ‘Subscription Libraries and Commercial Circulating Libraries in Colonial Philadelphia and New York’, in Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States, ed. by T. Augst and K. Carpenter (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), pp. 24–52.

6. For a discussion of college libraries in the colonial period, see D. R. Whitesell, ‘The Harvard College Library and its Users, 1762–1764: Reassessing the Relevance of Colonial American College Libraries’, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 118.2 (2008), 339–405.

7. K. A. Manley, ‘Jeremy Bentham has been Banned: Contention and Censorship in Private Subscription Libraries before 1825’, Library & Information History, 29.3 (2013), 170–81. For Manley, these dual influences on Franklin are what distinguish British subscription libraries from their North American counterparts.

8. As Carpenter notes, the Society Library was public in the only in the sense that it was not the collection of one individual; rather, it was shared. Our contemporary notion of a public library, that is, one that is free to its users and funded via municipal, state, or federal taxes, came into being with the founding of the Boston Public Library in 1851.

9. ‘Articles of the Subscription Roll of the New-York Library’, 2 April 1754, included in the trustee minutes for 1754.

10. Thomas Augst, ‘Introduction: American Libraries and Agencies of Culture’, American Studies, 42.3 (2001), 5–22 (p. 7).

11. This practice was discontinued in the early 1760, as the trustees felt that non-subscribers were more likely to damage books, in spite of their deposits: ‘whereas it appears to the Trustees that many of the Books have been greatly injured and Abused Therefore Resolved that the Librarian be directed not to Suffer any person who is not a subscriber to have any Books out of the Library for the Future’. Minutes of the New York Society Library Trustees, 6 May 1761. As a point of contrast, the Library Company also lent to non-members, but continued this practice into the 1770s, often waiving the required deposit. Green argues that this was a direct response to the policies of circulating libraries. See Green, pp. 67–69.

12. E. Jennifer Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), p. 143.

13. For an extended discussion of the relation of John Sharp’s collection to the founding of the New York Society Library, see E. Schreiner, ‘The John Sharp Collection at the New York Society Library’ <http://nysoclib.org/blog/john-sharp-collection-new-york-society-library> [accessed 24 January 2015], and ‘Another Word about the John Sharp Collection’ <http://nysoclib.org/blog/another-word-about-john-sharp-collection> [accessed 24 January 2015].

14. Glynn, pp. 493–529.

15. Minutes of the Trustees of the New York Society Library, 11 September 1754.

16. All three terms were deployed by the trustees in describing the library and its intended uses. The trustees asked London bookseller Moses Franks to acquire the work of ‘such other modern authors as he may judge suitable for a public Library & have obtained an established Reputation among the Learned’ (Minutes of the Trustees of the New York Society Library, 11 September 1754); and had earlier announced their intention that ‘a public library would be very useful, as well as advantageous, to this city and our intended college’ (‘Articles of the Subscription Roll of the New-York Library’, 2 April 1754).

17. J. Raven, London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748–1811 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), p. 9.

18. Minutes of the Trustees of the New York Society Library, 7 May 1754.

19. Though a full analysis of each of these titles is beyond the scope of this article, I highlight Vertot as his are some of the many works that the Society Library list had in common with that of the Library Company. ‘In America where a search after rights and liberties had been responsible for the settlement of most of the colonies, Vertot’s works were ubiquitous. There was hardly a library that did not contain them and it is interesting to conjecture their influence upon the revolution in America.’ E. Wolf, ‘Franklin and his Friend Chose their Books’, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 80.1 (1956), 11–36.

20. Minutes of the Trustees of the New York Society Library, 6 May 1761.

21. Raven, London Booksellers and American Customers, p. 7. ‘The other issue central to changes to the kinds of books imported — and the one often related to arguments about the later decline in foreign imports — is the allegation that London booksellers used the colonies as a dumping ground for unwanted remainders and poor sellers.’

22. This was a common practice in the period. Raven calls it ‘a natural extension of the private book and pamphlet lending among friends, family, and like-minded associates’. Raven, p. 83.

23. The Library would eventually obtain these in 1791 from William Samuel Johnson, a trustee of the Library and a faculty member (and later president) of Columbia College, in exchange for three additional shares in the Library and £21.

24. See Green, p. 64, who notes that the Library Company faced a similar challenge: ‘The Library Company was a collection of worthy and approved titles, already aging as any permanent collection does’.

25. As a point of contrast, W. Slauter notes that the Library Company of Baltimore did not seek to purchase from domestic booksellers until after 1807, when the Embargo Act prohibited book imports. See ‘Bringing Books into Baltimore: Tracing Networks of Textual Importation, 1760–1825’, Book History, 16 (2013), 62–88.

26. The Library would attempt to shift its book buying back to London in the 1820s, when libraries could import books tax-free. On 23 January 1826, the trustees wrote to the bookseller John Miller, ‘The New York Society Library has hitherto very much depended upon the purchase of books in this country, but as it has the privilege of importing books free of duty, there is an inducement for a change to its system in this particular’.

27. H. Lehmann-Haupt, The Book in America: A History of the Making and Selling of Books in the United States, 2nd edn (New York: R. R. Bowker Company, 1951), p. 120. This number dipped to eight during the Revolution, but dramatically increased throughout the 1790s, going from nineteen in 1792 to fifty-six just six years later.

28. See G. G. Raddin, An Early New York Library of Fiction: With a Checklist of the Fiction in H. Caritat’s Circulating Library, No. 1 City Hotel, Broadway, New York, 1804 (New York: Wilson, 1940). Other circulating libraries were even less expensive: Samuel Berrian’s library charged $4.50 per year; Melitiah Nash’s library, $3.50 per year.

29. Raven, p. 47.

30. This transaction is recorded in the trustee minutes of September 1792; a receipt dated 6 December 1972 bears Joanna Livingston’s signature and states, ‘I hereby acknowledge to have received 2 shares in the New York Society Library for account of the 1st year’s rent of my lott [sic] in Wall Street now occupied by Michael Gluck which I agree to Lease to the said Corporation for ever at the rent of fifty pounds for one year from the 1st day of May next and 70 pounds every year thereafter’.

31. Keep, p. 232. ‘In reviewing the finances, we shall presently see that in erecting the new building the Trustees had gone beyond their depth. With the first loan in 1794 began an indebtedness that was destined to weigh down the institution for over sixty years, at times with a hopeless obstinacy.’

32. See Glynn, p. 506. ‘Faced with shrinking revenues from subscriptions and a rising debt, the trustees might have alleviated their financial distress by taking steps to make the library more attractive to the burgeoning reading public. Instead they raised the cost of the shares and the annual fee in a vain attempt to achieve solvency.’ The trustees may have felt that maintaining the cost of a share allowed them to maintain a reputation for exclusiveness, even as they sought to attract new members.

33. The Society Library was not the only subscription library that sought to increase the amount of fiction in its collections. See James Raven’s chapter ‘Fiction, Prints, and Changing Attractions’, in his London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748–1811 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), pp. 184–203. For a general discussion of the rise of fiction in the late eighteenth century, see R. B. Winans, ‘The Growth of a Novel-Reading Public in Late-Eighteenth-Century America’, Early American Literature, 9.3 (1974), 267–75.

34. A Supplementary Catalogue of the Books Belonging to the New-York Society Library which have been added since the year 1793 (New York: Printed by T. & J. Swords, 1800).

35. Minutes of the Trustees of the New York Society Library, 7 May 1800.

36. The circulation records of 1799–1805 demonstrate that readers often took multi-volume works out for very short periods. On 24 July 1801, Rebekah Hendricks borrowed all four volumes of Governess, or Courtland Abbey (Bath: Printed by S. Hazard, and sold by Vernor and Hood, London, 1797) only to return them the next day. On 28 June 1802, John Goodeve borrowed the same, and returned it in exchange for Joseph Fox’s Santa Maria, or the Mysterious Pregnancy, a Romance (Cork: Printed by J. Connor, J. Haly, and M. Harris, Booksellers, 1799), which he kept for only one day. The Society Library’s circulation records database will eventually allow us to determine whether these patterns of rapid borrowing are more common for novels or whether they apply to all of the types of works borrowed by readers. This type of rapid reading is attested in many libraries. See, for example, E. B. Todd, ‘Antebellum Libraries in Richmond and New Orleans and the Search for the Practices and Preferences of “Real” Readers’, American Studies, 42.3 (2001), 195–209.

37. R. J. Zboray’s analysis of the Society Library records from 1847–49 and 1854–56 concludes that there are no significant differences in the reading habits of men and women from that period, though he does note, ‘The French periodical Revue des deux mondes does exemplify women’s greater interest in the literature of that country’. See A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 156–79 (p. 166).

38. The Society Library’s current database counts popular works by the number of times a single volume of a work is borrowed; for example, one reader borrowing three volumes of a three-volume work one at a time would count as three transactions. For a more nuanced approach to calculating the popularity of works at the Society Library, see P. Spedding, ‘Eliza Haywood’s Eighteenth-Century Readers in Pennsylvania and New York’, Australian Humanities Review, 56 (2014), 69–93.

39. This title is listed in the 1789 catalogue. It is difficult to determine which nine-volume octavo edition the Library owned. Two possibilities include one printed in Edinburgh (Natural history general and particular, by the Count de Buffon, translated into English. Illustrated with above 260 copper-plates, and occasional notes and observations by the translator (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1780–85)) and one printed in London (Natural history general and particular, by the Count de Buffon, translated into English. Illustrated with above 300 copper-plates, and occasional notes and observations. By William Smellie, Member Of The Antiquarian And Royal Societies Of Edinburgh, 2nd edn (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1785)).

40. Listed in the 1793 catalogue and probably the 1789 London edition translated by Thomas Holcroft and printed by G. G. J. and J. Robinson.

41. The 1793 library catalogue lists both a ten-volume edition of Rousseau’s works in English and a thirty-volume edition of his works in French, as well as separated editions of the Confessions and Emilius.

42. James Raven in ‘Social Libraries and Library Societies in Eighteenth-Century North America’, in Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States, ed. by Thomas Augst and Kenneth Carpenter, Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), pp. 24–52, suggests that ‘even when some women were admitted as shareholders, as is the case at New York, Philadelphia, and then Baltimore, most women were associated with libraries as borrowers of books under their husband’s or father’s authority’ (p. 45).

43. P. M. Valentine, ‘America’s Antebellum Social Libraries: A Reappraisal in Institutional Development’, Library & Information History, 27.1 (2011), 32–51. ‘Attitudes towards books and other printed materials might also vary as library content generally shifted from serious non-fiction and classics to a broader selection of materials’ (p. 38).

44. Green, p. 61, also notes that these policies also protected librarians, who were often held financially responsible for lost books.

45. For Cornell’s 1789–92 borrowing activity, see <http://nysoclib.org/collection/ledger/people/cornell_gillian> [accessed 6 April 2015]. By 1803–04, Cornell or someone else in his household was using the account primarily to borrow novels and other light reading.

46. This was common practice in other areas as well. See Slauter, p. 70. ‘New British novels and periodicals were some of the most popular texts in the Library, and in high demand by readers, so the Library always attempted to secure these from London as quickly as possible.’

47. Green, p. 70.

48. Unfortunately, only one reader request from this period still exists in the Society Library’s archives. Dated 3 January 1791, it reads, ‘4 Vols Female Stability, or Zelucco, or any good novel or British Theatre’.

49. These works are already listed in the 1800 catalogue as ‘Celilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress. By Miss Burney. 3 vols. 12mo. Dublin, 1795’ and ‘Theodore Cyphon, or the Benevolent Jew, a novel. By George Walker, author of Tynian House, &c. 2 vols. 12mo. Dublin 1794’, which underscores the fact that these later purchases from Caritat might have been needed as second copies of or the replacements for popular works.

50. Novels, for the Society Library, were a necessary evil; they always needed to be new, current, and purchased quickly, and were probably seen by some members as a drain on the Library’s purchasing funds. By 1829, Librarian Philip Forbes (John Forbes’s son) proposed making them into an entirely separate collection: ‘The following arrangement is proposed for supplying the members of the New York Society Library with the new Novels, Romances, etc. It is proposed first that the Trustees discontinue the purchase of those classes of books mentioned above, and see those they now have to their Librarian. That they permit the Librarian to occupy the part of the novel now allocated to novels, and to receive payment of those who chose to subscribe to the novel library on the condition that he (the Librarian) constantly keep a supply of these above descriptions, particularly the new ones, and loan them to the members of the Society Library at $4 per annum, to persons not members at $5 per annum with proportionate charges for to each for less time.’ This plan was not adopted.