Theodore Jones is not a librarian but a writer specialising in architecture, preservation and housing issues for the New York Times and the Times‐Mirror Magazine Group. Librarians have a habit of shunning books about libraries written by non‐librarians, but here we have a volume not to be ignored.
What Ted (his own appellation!) Jones has done here is to list the Carnegie library buildings in the USA, all 1,689 of them, state by state, and to survey many of them. There is a brief but telling foreword by Karal Ann Stirling, of the University of Minnesota, in which she reminds us that Carol Kennicott, heroine of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, was a librarian before she married. Main Street was published in 1920 at a time when Carnegie buildings were recognisable prototypes of libraries in towns not only in the USA but throughout Britain as well. Jones’s book is well‐ illustrated, showing mainly the exteriors of the Carnegie libraries, and demonstrating their neo‐classical style with the inevitable stone steps leading up to their stately porticos, (no concessions to the handicapped in those years!). These facades are just as well‐known to us in Britain as they are to librarians in the USA.
Jones begins with a chapter on Andrew Carnegie himself, how he was born in Dunfermline in 1835 in humble circumstances, how his father emigrated to the USA in 1848, and how Andrew progressed from a job at $1.20 an hour to becoming the tycoon who was able to endow public libraries in many parts of the world, and to make many other charitable donations as well. Carnegie funded his first library building in 1881 in his home town of Dunfermline (horribly misspelt in the index as Dumfermline!). In the USA two communities both claim to have the first Carnegie libraries, both being in Pennsylvania. Allegheny, now part of Pittsburgh, accepted Carnegie’s offer in 1886 but did not dedicate its building until February 1890. Braddock, also near Pittsburgh, accepted a later grant but dedicated its building earlier, in March 1889. It will be remembered that the steel tycoon made his fortune in the Pittsburgh locality, so with these grants and others to Philadelphia and the city of Pittsburgh itself, Carnegie was obviously trying to say thank you to the people who had helped him to make his money.
From then on Carnegie helped hundreds of communities to provide library buildings in their midst. The scale of his financial assistance is summarised by Ted Jones, and it is mind‐boggling: 89 public libraries were provided for 1,419 communities with grants totalling $41,748,689, about $800 million in 1996 dollars. The largest grant was $5,202,621 to New York City, and the smallest was $4,000 to Bayliss, California. Most grants went to Indiana (156), California (121) and Illinois (105), but Rhode Island, Delaware and Alaska received none at all. More than 1,000 grants were made for less than $15,000, indicating that most libraries were built in communities of less than 7,500 population. Applications flooded in, and a cartoon reproduced by Jones from a St. Paul newspaper depicts a sad‐looking horse hauling a cart overflowing with envelopes being shovelled off by an overworked functionary. The caption reads: “Speaking of libraries, how would you like to be the mail man?”.
Of course, the applications were rarely sifted by Andrew Carnegie himself, and sometimes never even decided by him. That chore was done by James Bertram, his personal secretary, who supervised the public library building programme. Originally, Bertram worked from a formula, calculating grants at between $2 and $3 per resident. But this had to be abandoned when Carnegie and Bertram discovered that communities were inflating their population figures in order to attract higher grants. Gradually Bertram began to require more information about architectural plans before making financial decisions. Librarians will not find much information in this book about the interiors of Carnegie public library buildings, but they will be impressed by the number of illustrations of their exteriors. The volume is also rich in statistical information, presented in two appendices. The second of these is a gazetteer of Carnegie libraries, arranged by states. Under each is an alphabetical list of the communities which received grants, with dates and amounts given, and the current status of the buildings provided. Many of these have been razed and no longer exist, others have been translated to alternative uses such as civic offices, museums, police stations and community centres, but a surprising number remain in use as libraries nearly 100 years after their dedications.
Ted Jones’ book should appeal to library historians everywhere. He admits that later librarians have given mixed reviews to Carnegie’s library grants, but claims that they made many communities realise the value of public libraries decades before they might otherwise have done. The book is well‐researched and is extremely readable. It begs the question: What about a similar volume describing Carnegie libraries in Britain and its erstwhile colonies? Such a book could be a valuable contribution to library history, and if I were 20 years younger I would not mind tackling the project myself. But I leave the idea to be taken up by a younger librarian.
