LET'S GO TO THE LIBRARY

In Britain, Sir Thomas Bodley rebuilt Humphrey's library at
Oxford in the late 1500s. It was renamed the Bodlean Library
and today ranks as the second largest in the country. The
largest, of course, is the British Library, founded in 1759
as part of the British Museum.


The earliest public library in the UK was associated with
London's Guild Hall in 1425. A second opened in Edinburgh,
Scotland in 1580. Neither of these still exists, but one
established in 1653 in Manchester, England does. Once
Parliament passed the Public Library Act in 1850, libraries
began to spread throughout the nation.

                        

In France, the national library in Paris known as
Bibliotheque Nationale de France began in 1367 as the Royal
Library of Charles V. Another significant library, famous
for its influence on library management, is the Mazarine
Library, also in Paris. Cardinal Jules Mazarin, chief
minister of France during Louis XIV's minority, founded it
in 1643.


Three libraries form the national repository for Germany.
The first, the German State Library in Berlin, was founded
in 1661 by Friedrich Wilhelm. The second and third followed
much later: the German Library in Leipzig, founded in 1912
and the German Library in Frankfurt, founded in 1946.


The oldest library in America began with a 400-book donation
by a Massachusetts clergyman, John Harvard, to a new
university that eventually honored him by adopting his name.
Another clergyman, Thomas Bray from England, established the
first free lending libraries in the American Colonies in the
late 1600s.


Subscription libraries - where member dues paid for book
purchases and borrowing privileges were free - debuted in
the 1700s. In 1731, Ben Franklin and others founded the
first such library, the Library Company of Philadelphia.
The initial collection of the Library of Congress was in
ashes after the British burned it during the War of 1812.
The library bought Thomas Jefferson's vast collection in
1815 and used that as a foundation to rebuild.