THE LOST LIBRARIES

THE RECENT CLOSURE of the last of Boots' Booklovers' Libraries has seemingly brought us near the end of a long and fascinating chapter of library history. I call it a ‘chapter’ strictly in the figurative sense, as the story of the commercial circulating libraries remains virtually untold, largely because much of what we would like to know about them has been irretrievably lost, or else lies buried in the archives of the firms which operated them.