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"Before the Public Library explores the emergence of community-based lending libraries in the Atlantic World before the advent of the Public Library movement in the mid-nineteenth century. Essays by eighteen scholars from a range of disciplines seek to place, for the first time, community libraries within an Atlantic context over a two-century period. Taking a comparative approach, this volume shows that community libraries played an important - and largely unrecognized - role in shaping Atlantic social networks, political and religious movements, scientific and geographic knowledge, and economic enterprise. Libraries had a distinct role to play in shaping modern identities through the acquisition and circulation of specific kinds of texts, the fostering of sociability, and the building of community-based institutions"-- Building Religious Communities with Books: the Quaker and Anglican Transatlantic Libraries, 1650-1710 / Louisiane Ferlier -- Poetry and Civic Urbanism in the Coffee-house Library in the Mid-eighteenth Century / Markman Ellis -- Of Mudfish, Harpsichords and Books: Libraries and Community in Eighteenth-century Jamaica / April G. Shelford -- Affleck Generations: the Libraries of the Boswells of Auchinleck,1695-1825 / James J. Caudle -- Sedition, Revolution and Libertinism In Eighteenth-century Brazil: the Library Of Naturalist Jose Vieira Couto / Junia Ferreira Furtado -- Uncommon Knowledge: Late Eighteenth-century American Subscription Library Collections / Cheryl Knott -- Reading Sheffield: Sheffield Libraries and Book Clubs, 1771-1850 / Sue Roe and Loveday Herridge -- Challenging Institutional Ambitions: the Practice of Book Exchanges at the New York Society Library, 1789-1795 / Rob Koehler -- A "Quaint Corner" of the Reading Nation: Romantic Readerships in Rural Perthshire, 1780-1830 / Katie Halsey -- From Private Devotion to "Public" Education: Northern Dissenting Academy Libraries and their Benefactors / Rachel Eckersley -- The Foundation of Plymouth Public Library: Cultural Status, Philanthropy and Expanding Readerships, 1810-1825 / Annika Bautz -- Reading on the Edge of the Atlantic: the Easton Library Company / Christopher Phillips -- Crafting Respectability: the Politics of Class at the Mechanic Apprentices' Library of Boston / Lynda K. Yankaskas -- Reading Publics: Books, Communities and Readers in the Early History of American Public Libraries / Tom Glynn -- From Voluntary to State Action: Samuel Smiles, James Silk Buckingham and the Rise of the Public Library Movement in Britain / Alistair Black
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