Building an Ark by Sherry Early
“I am preserving stories, what educator Charlotte Mason called “living books”. And although I am protecting the books from flood and fire, I hope, I am ultimately more concerned about pulling all of the good books that I can save out of the inundation of trash and twaddle and and pernicious indoctrination that I see all around me.”
Books By Mail and Me by Kathy Twitchell
“We live in a small town in the middle of nowhere. I have owned more books than the tiny local public library for at least two decades. We rapidly outgrew their collection before the oldest of our six children turned ten. Because our town’s library service was so limited for so many years, we qualified for the state library’s Books by Mail program, as did the majority of smaller towns in the state. We have borrowed many hundreds of books this way. Because the Maine State Library is taxpayer funded, there was no fee for this service IF your town met the qualifications. If the town was not on the list, the service was not available at all.”
Why Libraries by Diane Pendergraft
In 1731, Benjamin Franklin founded a subscription library now called The Library Company of Philadelphia. It was established by fifty founding members who contributed 40 shillings each and agreed to pay ten shillings per year to maintain membership. According to the Library’s website, “All of the books the Library Company acquired year by year over more than two and a half centuries are still on its shelves, along with many others added since it was transformed into a research library in the 1950s … Nonmembers could borrow books by depositing their value as security ‘and paying a small Acknowledgment for the Reading’” (“At the Instance of Benjamin Franklin,” Edwin Wolf, p.3).