The Boston Public Library: The First City to Lend Its Books

When the Boston Public Library opened its doors in eighteen fifty-four, it was the first major public library in the United States to allow patrons to borrow books and take them home. This was not obvious. For most of the history of libraries, books were reference objects to be consulted on the premises, not lent to strangers who might damage them, lose them, or simply not return. Boston made a different bet: that knowledge shared freely, carried home, discussed at the kitchen table, was worth the risk of occasional loss.

The building you can see today, the McKim Building on Boylston Street, opened in eighteen ninety-five and was designed by Charles McKim of the firm McKim, Mead and White. It is one of the finest Beaux-Arts civic buildings in the country: the arched loggia, the courtyard fountain, the mural cycles inside by John Singer Sargent and Puvis de Chavannes. Boston spent this kind of money on a public library because the people who commissioned it believed that a democratic society that denied its citizens access to learning was not fully democratic. The argument was not subtle. The building makes it visible.

The library holds John Adams's personal book collection, among its rarest holdings. It holds a first edition of John James Audubon's Birds of America, a work so large it must be stored flat and turns pages the size of a tablecloth. It holds the papers of local politicians, the photographs of neighborhoods that no longer exist, and the oral history recordings of communities that built this city.

The idea that knowledge belongs to everyone, and not only to those who can afford the libraries that hold it, is old enough in Boston to have a building this grand and this beautiful.