Magazine Subscriptions Blog

This is an interesting post today about the history of library subscription services. Who knew that the idea of reading a magazine subscription in a local public library or a school library originated with Ben Franklin. The Library Company of Philadelphia was a typically pragmatic Franklinian invention. It grew out of the Junto, a discussion group that the twenty-one-year-old Benjamin Franklin created in 1727 with like-minded aspiring artisans and tradesmen who hoped to improve themselves while they improved their community. Discussions within the Junto gave rise to many of the Philadelphia organizations and institutions that made life better for so many people.

Whether it was a plan to pave city streets, create a town watch or fire company, found an academy, insure houses from loss by fire, establish a hospital or a learned society, or create a library, Franklin’s benevolent genius was evident, joining people together in common cause. In his Autobiography Franklin noted that “there was not a good Bookseller’s Shop in any of the Colonies to the Southward of Boston.”

(1) He related that during meetings of the Junto, books were frequently referred to and members thought it would be convenient to have a library 2 which they could turn. At first they pooled their books into a common library, or at least “such Books as we could best spare.” But the number of books was never great, the members were loathe to part with their favorite titles, and sometimes there was a “want of due Care of them,” so after about a year the collection was broken up, and the books returned to their original owners.

(2) Franklin then conceived the idea of a subscription library so-called because it was organized as a joint-stock company. Franklin drafted the Library Company’s plans, rules, and articles of agreement in 1731 after the requisite fifty shareholders had been recruited, and by early 1732 there was a capital fund of one hundred pounds and an annual income of twenty-five pounds. The library’s first quarters were in the homes of its earliest librarians until 1739, Franklin’s ingenious solution to the problem of access to books, the subscription library, was copied up and down the Atlantic seaboard from Salem, Massachusetts, to Charleston, South Carolina. Such libraries, he noted in his Autobiography, improved the general Conversation of the Americans, made the common Tradesmen & Farmers as intelligent as most Gentlemen from other Countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the Stand so generally made throughout the Colonies in Defense of their Privileges.”

(5) The year 1773 marked the beginning of a new phase in the Library Company’s history, when the collection was moved to the second floor of nearby Carpenters’ Hall. On September 5, 1774, the First Continental Congress convened on the first floor of Carpenters’ Hall. John Adams reported that the delegates had taken “a View of the Room, and of the Chamber where is an excellent Library.