The act of borrowing; or, some libraries in American literature

Scholars of library culture have emphasized the importance of organizational systems and lending practices to the history of United States libraries, and to their emergence as practical and rhetorical sites of democratic significance in the US. This chapter examines literary representations of US library patrons and their acts of borrowing to complicate the idea of the North American library as a democratic institution. Drawing on a range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary engagements with the reading rooms and varied holdings of US libraries—social, domestic, reference, and free—it argues that writers of all stripes critiqued the limits of America’s changing democratic practices by reimagining the borrower’s roles and capabilities. For writers including Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, and Henry James, the borrower’s imaginative uses, manipulations, and circumventions of the library’s rules and regulations drew attention to the contradictions which had come to characterize the US democratic project by the beginning of the twentieth century.