A couple of weeks ago the New York Times had an article about the reading habits of residents of Muncie Indiana in the late 19th century. A Ball State University Professor, Frank Felsenstein, found ledgers from the Muncie Public Library with patron’s names and everything they had checked out of the library between 1891 and 1902. He and his colleagues created a database and cross referenced it with census data for the period. Here is what they created:
The database is called “What Middletown Read” because of a 1929 sociological study of Muncie that labeled the town as an average American town. The most read books and authors are listed here.
Although Athenaeum members have never been “average” I decided to compare what Muncie readers read to what our collections hold. Horatio Alger was the most popular author in the Muncie study but the Athenaeum only holds 4 of his works, one of which is a biography. In fact the only popular Muncie author that the Athenaeum avidly collected, we have 38 of his titles, was Francis Marion Crawford, a writer of romantic travel novels mostly of Italy. Popular fiction, not the classics, were the most circulated titles during the period.
The Athenaeum has ledgers similar to the ones used at the Muncie Public Library, from 1815 and our days as the Providence Library Company, to 1894 although there is a large gap between 1853 and 1891. Kate Wodehouse, Collections Librarian, calls them charging books and uses them regularly in exhibits.
Thanks John and Kate
