Download or read book Before the Public Library written by Mark R. M. Towsey and published by Library of the Written Word. This book was released on 2018 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the Public Libraryexplores 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.