![]() ![]() Between 18, Andrew Carnegie underwrote the construction of more than sixteen hundred public libraries in the United States, buildings from which children were routinely turned away, because they needed to be protected from morally corrupting books, especially novels. Meanwhile, libraries were popping up in American cities and towns like crocuses at first melt. Samuel Tilden, who left $2.4 million to establish a free library in New York, nearly changed his mind when he found out that ninety per cent of the books checked out of the Boston Public Library were fiction. ![]() ![]() Even if you got inside, the librarians would shush you, carping about how the “young fry” read nothing but “the trashy”: Scott, Cooper, and Dickens (one century’s garbage being, as ever, another century’s Great Books). In 1895, when she was twenty-four, she moved to New York, where she more or less invented the children’s library.Īt the time, you had to be fourteen, and a boy, to get into the Astor Library, which opened in 1854, the same year as the Boston Public Library, the country’s first publicly funded city library, where you had to be sixteen. Her seven older brothers called her Shrimp. ![]() She had a horse named Pocahontas, a father who read to her from Aesop’s Fables, and a grandmother with no small fondness for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Annie, whose taste ran to “Little Women,” was a reader and a runt. Anne Carroll Moore was born long ago but not so far away, in Limerick, Maine, in 1871. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |