This Week in Literary History: America’s First Lending Library Gets its First Ten Members

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In 1731, Benjamin Franklin had an idea. At that time, in colonial America, books were rare, and prohibitively expensive for most people—not to mention the fact that they took forever to arrive from Europe. A few years earlier, Franklin had established a “society of mutual improvement” called the Junto, which would regularly meet to discuss “queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy,” as Franklin put it. But none of the members had enough money for the personal libraries they wanted, and sometimes their queries went unanswered.

So Franklin convinced the other members of the Junto to pool their resources and purchase a communal library of books, with the idea that both members and non-members would be able to borrow them freely. Articles of Agreement for the Library Company of Philadelphia were drafted on July 1, 1731, and by November 8th, they had found 50 founding subscribers, who would each contribute 40 shillings to the library, with a promise of 10 shillings a year after. It turned out, though, as Franklin biographer J.A. Leo Lamay put it, that “funds came in slower than pledges,” and on November 10, only ten people came to Nicholas Scull’s Bear Tavern to pay their dues, and only two of those were not already officers of the library.

But they soon got their 50 subscribers, and by the following year, had ordered their first set of books from London. Notably, at a time when the books in most private and university libraries were predominantly in Latin, the majority of the books they ordered were in English, so as to be more widely accessible. When the books arrived, they were available for all subscribers to borrow for free; non-subscribers were  allowed to borrow them as well, but they had to provide collateral for the book’s value. It was the first lending library in America, and quickly grew in size and fame. It was, as Franklin wrote in 1771, after many other similar institutions had popped up around the country, “the Mother of all the N[orth] American Subscription Libraries now so numerous.”

The Library Company of Philadelphia still exists today as an independent research library, and still keeps its oldest books on the shelves.