BOOK BORROWING AND UNEMPLOYMENT

In the 1930s, several groups researching aspects of poverty in general and unemployment in particular reported findings concerning reading behaviour. The most ambitious of these groups, and subsequently the most influential, was investigating the thesis that “prolonged unemployment leads to a state of apathy in which the victims do not utilize any longer even the few opportunities left to them”. The researchers studied the effects of the closure between July 1929 and February 1930, of a large factory dominating the employment and lives of a small Austrian town, Marienthal. With regard to library use, their thesis as regards dwindling use of opportunities at least was dramatically confirmed. The records of the Marienthal Workers' Library showed that from 1929 to 1931 the number of loans dropped by 49% even though a borrowing charge that had been levied before the plant closure had been suspended. Furthermore, even those who continued to borrow books actually borrowed fewer. In 1929 an average of 3.23 books per reader were borrowed and this had dropped to only 1.60 books by 1931. This was not apparently merely because the unemployed had read all the available books since the library obtained the contents of another library just before the closure occurred.