“The fate of social and public libraries alike in the nineteenth century depended entirely on their willingness and capacity to multiply their traffic in books. And in no aspect of their collection or circulation policies did libraries do more to liberate nineteenth-century concepts and institutions of culture from paternalistic “can’t” than in the mass circulation of fiction. As they obsessively tabulated statistics on circulation the annual report of these institutions consistently found that patrons borrowed novels more than any other kind of reading, and did so at a rate that far exceeded the percentage of fiction held by collections…At the turn of the century, writers and speakers often asserted that two-thirds of the circulation of public libraries could be attributed to “juvenile fiction and fiction””. (Augst 176)
This passage made me think about how public libraries can record reading trends. I’m really curious to know more about the“juvenile fiction” novels the NYPL has the most of from the turn of the century. I’d like to have them all stacked in front of me. How many are there of the same edition? What do these novels say about the general public’s taste and values? where in the library was one able to find them? What do they look like?
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