DEVELOPMENT OF PUBLIC LIBRARIES 277 



leading place, as the colleges had been founded mainly to 

 educate ministers. So in the Harvard college library cata- 

 logue of 1790, 150 pages out of 350 are filled with theology, 

 10 with the Greek and Latin classics, 4 with books of travel, 

 but only three fourths of a page with periodicals. In litera- 

 ture, however, one finds Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Mil- 

 ton, Dryden, Pope, Gay, the Gentleman's Magazine, Rabelais, 

 La Fontaine, Voltaire, Boccaccio. In 1765 Yale college was 

 ''well furnished with ancient authors, such as the fathers, his- 

 torians, classics, many and valuable works of divinity, history, 

 philosophy, and mathematics, but not many authors who have 

 written within these thirty years." 



The social libraries were different. The library company 

 of Philadelphia, whose selection probably was largely deter- 

 mined by Franklin's taste, no doubt was imitated by other 

 proprietary libraries. It had scarcely one theological book or 

 controversial tract; politics was not prominent; history, 

 travels, science, natural history, and especially the mechanic 

 arts, formed the bulk of the stock (but it must be remembered 

 that a dozen of our sciences and a score of our arts had no 

 existence then). PoUte literature was scantily represented, 

 especially in the department of fiction, the library committee 

 in 1783 having instructed its London agent that though not 

 averse to mingling the dulce with the utile, they did not care 

 to have him buy any novels — a rule which has largely pre- 

 vailed since. 



Art, which in the last decade has begun to fill so large a 

 place on our shelves, was not to be found in any of the early 

 libraries. The Boston atheneum, however, received in 1838 

 from a generous proprietor a large number of works of art, and 

 became the pioneer of bibliothecal art development. 



The character of the reading differed somewhat from ours. 

 It was in larger proportion the reading of the man who is curi- 

 ous about some one branch of knowledge, or the reading of the 

 man who in a general way wants to improve himself. Fiction, 

 which supplies 75 per cent of the circulation of the modem 

 town or cit}^ library, was not furnished by either the college or 

 the association libraries. For that the readers went to the 

 circulating libraries, which no doubt seemed to the Sir An- 



