Collecting contested titles: the experience of five small public libraries in the rural Midwest, 1893-1956.

This essay is an analysis of the history of how, when, and if five small public libraries in the rural Midwest acquired ten controversial books published between 1885 and 1951. My research is extracted from a database that records all titles obtained by these five libraries over an eighty-year period. It also incorporates analysis of when these titles appeared (or did not appear) in acquisitions guides like Fiction Catalog and Standard Catalog for Public Libraries and notes which of these guides were purchased by the five libraries. I conclude that the collections of each of these five libraries tended to reflect the cultural values systems of the local elites who ran them.

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As of this writing, there are more public libraries in the United States than McDonald's restaurants, and as many children participate in public library--sponsored summer reading programs as in Little League baseball. Of the nine thousand urban and rural public library systems in the United States, over 80 percent reside in towns with populations less than twenty-five thousand. (1) Rare is the town of more than three thousand that does not boast a public library, an institution that is, in many respects, uniquely American and has become the model other capitalist societies with Western style democracies have sought to emulate. In the twentieth century alone thousands of small public libraries in rural America have made available and circulated billions of books to millions of citizens young and old, male and female, black, red, yellow, brown, and white. Yet historians--including library historians--know relatively little about this unique but ubiquitous American institution.

Cheryl Malone's invitation to contribute an essay to this special issue of Libraries & Culture came at a time when I was writing a book-length manuscript I've tentatively entitled "Main Street Public Library: A Community Institution in the Rural Heartland, 1865-1956." The study takes a focused analysis of five small public libraries in five rural midwestern communities: the Moore Public Library in Lexington, Michigan; the Morris Public Library in Morris, Illinois; the Rhinelander District Library in Rhinelander, Wisconsin; the Sage Public Library in Osage, Iowa; and the Bryant Library in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. Readers familiar with American literature will immediately recognize the last site; Sinclair Lewis was born and raised there, and many have argued that Sauk Centre is really the fictionalized town of Gopher Prairie he described in his best-selling and still frequently read Main Street; ergo, my title. (2) Three of my five small public libraries do, in fact, reside on Main Street. Chronologically, my research project covers their histories from the origins of each institution in the late nineteenth century through passage of the 1956 Library Services Act, the first federal legislation to provide grants to local public libraries through state library agencies in order to supplement their collections and services.

I am very pleased to be able to extract some of the data from that research to craft an essay that honors the contributions to library history of Don Davis and allows me to thank him for thirty years of friendship and (sometimes) collaboration in this small corner of the larger scholarly worlds of history and librarianship. (3) The field of library history has significantly improved since the mid-1970s; substantial credit for that improvement goes to Don for his high quality scholarship and bibliographical work and for his editorial accomplishments at Libraries & Culture. He's been a marvelous ambassador for our craft; I will sorely miss him. Enjoy retirement, dear friend, and best of luck to you, Avis, and your wonderful family.

Why these five communities? Why these five libraries? All had conventional but important sources of historical information like microfilmed local newspapers, census data, and city council and library board minutes, and all were within easy driving distance of Madison, Wisconsin (at the time I was on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin School of Library and Information Studies). Equally important, however, all had saved their accessions books, a rich and relatively untapped research resource. Some had also saved some circulation records, which identified who read what when. (4)

What's an accession book? In the 1880s a library supplies company called the Library Bureau developed this common form for systematically recording every book acquired by a library. By the 1890s most small American public libraries had begun using Library Bureau accessions books, and as each of my five small public libraries established itself, each began entering acquisition records in accessions books they purchased from the Library Bureau. Because they did this so systematically, they automatically standardized bibliographic information, including title, author, publisher, place of publication, date acquired (and often when and why withdrawn), source of acquisition (e.g., purchased directly from the publisher or book distribution agency or obtained by donation), and often the broad Dewey Decimal number--those three digits to the left of the decimal that automatically classifies each title into broad groups by subject.

From my perspective the accessions books constituted a goldmine of information about book availability. Beginning in 1993 I had research assistants key this information into a relational database that when finished will allow me to compare and contrast collections over time by means of a variety of fields (including subject) and answer questions like: What information on African Americans was available to patrons of the Morris Public Library in the 1920s? How well were women represented in the fiction collections at the Rhinelander Public Library at the turn of the century? How much of the Moore Public Library came from New York publishers? What books were purchased--or not purchased--during periods of significant change (World War I, the Great Depression), and what does that tell us about the organizational behaviors and biases of this ubiquitous cultural institution?

For this essay honoring Don Davis, however, I selected ten titles, at least one published in every decade between the 1880s and 1950s. Most were controversial when published; some still are. When Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in 1885 it was banned by a variety of public libraries, including the Concord, Massachusetts, Public Library, which labeled it as "trash and suitable only for the slums." This attitude had staying power; in 1905 Huckleberry Finn was removed from the children's room of the Brooklyn Public Library. (5)

For the 1890s I chose Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), a novel that dealt with a woman's spiritual, intellectual, and sexual "awakening." Many reviewers found it offensive, and the St. Louis Public Library and its branches immediately banned it from their shelves. To represent a title published in the first decade of the twentieth century I selected Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, originally printed by Doubleday in 1900 but, shortly after the publisher's wife read an advance copy and objected to…