February is National Library Lovers Month. It’s a month-long excuse to use a library, get a card, return the overdue stack under the bed, or volunteer at the place that lent you most of what you read as a kid.
Libraries get sentimental treatment, and the sentiment hides the more interesting story.
The free public library, open to anyone and paid for by taxes, is a fairly recent invention. For most of American history a library was a private club, a church collection or a rich man’s study. What changed it was a series of deals, and the most important one was made by a steel magnate who handed towns a building and a bill. The deal is still running. The branch down the street exists because a town council signed a promise to pay for it every year and kept that promise.
Who founded the February observance for library lovers?
Nobody knows.
National Day Calendar tracks these observances, and it says it couldn’t identify a founder. No library association claims it and no proclamation set it up. Libraries use it anyway for card drives, displays and volunteer recruiting.
That puts it in the same category as plenty of literary observances on the calendar: a day or a month that spread because it was useful, with no author on record.
How did Benjamin Franklin’s library work?
You paid to join.
The Library Company of Philadelphia grew out of the Junto, a discussion club built around Franklin. Its members kept running into factual questions their conversations couldn’t settle, and the fix was a shared collection of books. On July 1, 1731, they drew up articles of agreement. Fifty subscribers each put in 40 shillings up front and promised 10 shillings a year after that to buy and maintain the books. Members borrowed free.
Outsiders could borrow too, if they left a deposit equal to the value of the book. The 1741 catalog shows the place open four hours on Saturday afternoons. That’s a subscription library, and for more than a century it was the American model. A library belonged to the people who paid for it.
When did American libraries become free and tax-supported?
In 1833, in a small town in New Hampshire.
The Peterborough Town Library, established that year, is described as the first public library in the world supported by taxes. It was small. The idea wasn’t. A town voted to spend public money on books anyone could borrow, and that’s the principle every public library since has run on.
Boston did it at scale. The Boston Public Library was established in 1848 and opened in 1854, the first large tax-supported public library in the country. Britain moved in the same direction with the Public Libraries Act of 1850. That law let boroughs set up free public libraries.
The principle was settled by mid-century. The money wasn’t. A town could vote for a free library and still have no way to pay for a building. Carnegie walked into that gap.
Why did Andrew Carnegie pay for public libraries?
Because a library had once been opened to him.
Carnegie came to the Pittsburgh area from Dunfermline, Scotland, as a poor boy. At twelve he was working as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill, and at about thirteen he became a telegraph messenger. A local man, Colonel James Anderson, opened his personal library of about 400 volumes to working boys on Saturday nights, and Carnegie borrowed steadily. He said later that if wealth ever came to him he wanted other poor boys to get the same opportunity. It came, and he did.
Carnegie money built 2,509 libraries worldwide between 1883 and 1929, starting with Dunfermline, and more than 1,600 of them went up in the United States. Construction grants for the American public library buildings came to about $40 million.
The money came with conditions, and the conditions are the clever part. A town had to show it needed a library and provide the site.
It had to pay for staff and upkeep from public funds, budget ten percent of the construction cost every single year for operations, and offer free service to all. Carnegie paid once. The town paid forever. He’d written that an endowed institution was “liable to become the prey of a clique,” and he wanted the library tied to the taxpayers who’d use it, so they’d have a stake in keeping it open.
Carnegie paid for the building once. The town promised to pay for the library every year after, and that promise is why your branch is still open.Share on X
What happened to the Carnegie library buildings?
Most of them are still there.
A 1992 survey found 1,554 of the 1,681 original American Carnegie buildings still standing, and 911 of them still working as libraries. Others became museums, offices and community centers.
Florida got ten. One of them is St. Petersburg’s Mirror Lake Community Library, built with a $17,500 Carnegie grant awarded in 1913 and opened on December 1, 1915, with 2,600 books. Henry D. Whitfield designed it in the Beaux-Arts style, buff brick with pilasters and deep cornices. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places, and it still lends books more than a century after the city signed Carnegie’s terms.
Who was shut out of the early public libraries?
In much of the South, Black residents were.
The promise of free service to all had a large exception. Southern cities barred Black residents from their public libraries, and Carnegie money paid for separate libraries for Black residents in Houston and Savannah. The Carnegie Corporation also told applicants to base their appropriations on the white population of a town.
Mirror Lake is a local example. When it opened, the city barred Black residents. From 1944 they could use only the basement, and the James W. Johnson branch opened in 1947 after a campaign led by Mrs. S.M. Carter. A library’s history includes who was allowed through the door, and the fuller story is the one worth telling during a month built around loving the place.
What do public libraries lend now?
Far more than books, and the local list here in Tampa Bay is a good example of how far the idea has stretched.
Several Pinellas branches lend tools. Clearwater Countryside Library lends torque wrenches, levels and vegetable seeds, and the seed library runs on the hope that you’ll grow the plants and bring seed back. St. Pete Beach’s library lends metal detectors, a fitting item on a barrier island where people have lost rings in the sand for a century, along with CD players for people who still own discs and have nothing to play them on.
Then there’s how a library gets built in the first place. In 1985, residents of Palm Harbor wanted a library and weren’t a city, so they had no municipal budget to pay for one. Their answer, covered in the post on Palm Harbor Library, was a special taxing district created by state law that let them tax themselves for it. That’s Peterborough’s 1833 idea, a century and a half later, in a Florida suburb.
Nationally, the scale is large. The ALA counted 9,057 public libraries in 2019, and in fiscal 2012 Americans made about 1.5 billion in-person visits to public libraries, roughly 4.1 million a day.
Why should writers love libraries?
Because a library is the cheapest research department a writer will ever get.
A card buys access to databases a freelancer couldn’t afford, interlibrary loan for out-of-print titles, and local history collections that exist nowhere online. A novelist checking what a town looked like in 1950, a memoir writer hunting a parent’s old newspaper clippings and a ghostwriter verifying a client’s dates all end up in the same place. Libraries are also where readers find authors they’ve never heard of.
A book on a branch shelf gets picked up by strangers, and a library hold list is a better signal of interest than most marketing a new author can buy.
I visit local bookstores for the Bookstores of Tampa Bay series on this site, and the library is the other half of the same system. A store sells a new book for a few months and sends back what didn’t move. A library keeps a copy on the shelf for years. That long tail is where a lot of readers meet a writer for the first time.
The local stuff matters most. Big systems and national archives have digitized a lot, and the town history room, the clipping files and the photographs donated by families mostly haven’t been. Those sit in a building, waiting for somebody to ask.
How should you mark National Library Lovers Month?
Get a card if you don’t have one, and use it for something you’d normally buy. The National Library Card Signup Month page covers what a card gets you.
Visit the oldest library building near you and find out who paid for it. If it’s a Carnegie, look up what the town promised and whether it kept the promise. Ask the staff about the local history collection, and ask what they lend that isn’t a book. In Pinellas the list runs from seed packets to metal detectors.
If you write, request a book for the collection, or donate a copy of your own to the local branch and ask whether it’ll go into circulation. And come back in April for National Library Week.
The full calendar of reading and writing observances is on the literary holidays list. A library lasts because a town keeps paying for it, and the cheapest way to keep a branch open is to walk in and borrow something, so the numbers show somebody’s using it.