Purposes of Subscription Library

For libraries to remain a place for a lively exchange of ideas, librarians should be armed with the right knowledge and strong conviction to preserve people’s rights.

The author starts off with a rhetorical question: “What kind of problem is a library?” urging the readers to think about this question as they continue to read the article. The question grabs the readers’ attention, and intrigues them to read on to find and answer. She further utilizes this technique of rhetorical questions throughout the article for the same purpose of emphasis on the vitality of the role of public libraries. Moreover, Smith extensively employs the use of metaphors and personification. For example, she describes the internet as libraries’ “universal death knell”, which portrays the internet’s negative impact on the development of

Within the 19th century American atmosphere, is a realm of cultural tropes that distinguishes themselves among the common literature that people read. Among these people, are different demographics as each publication caters to a specific audience on the basis of race, gender, and residing region. While the readers of these publications come from varying backgrounds and belief systems, there are unique similarities that provide insight as to how people were reading in the 19th century. These similarities contextualize what these readers were looking for in these publications as well as their interests and habits in respect to the demographics represented in the periodical archive.

The institution soon manifested its utility, was imitated by other towns, and in other provinces. The libraries were augmented by

In this essay, I will outline the details and advancements of the Reformation and Exploration, along with my view on which was the most important consequence of the printing press. Document A shows two maps of Europe. One of the maps shows how many printing presses there were and where they were located in 1471. The second map also shows how many and where printing presses were, but during 1500. The first map has very few dots indicating that during

Just like any library, ancient special libraries, also known as archives, where created to preserve and keep records of specific materials, such as business documents that were written on clay tablets at that time or papyrus scrolls that were about personal or business matters. At first, general libraries were mainly focused on providing educational materials for the adult population; however, libraries have gone through great transformations. Now-a-days, the libraries’ purpose has widened and now they focus on providing any needed information, educational or leisure materials to people of all ages and types of their communities (Rowland, Collection). Also, now public libraries have partnerships with school libraries and academic

In seventeenth century Europe there was a revolution that affected the world and continues to almost four hundred years later. This was not a war, or an economic explosion, nor a religious revival, but a revolution in the way that the people of Europe thought, the way they looked at the world. This revolution is known as the Enlightenment. However, this change of thought was not a turning point in all of European society, only in the upper class can the effects be seen in Europe’s philosophes and salons, the enlightened despots, and the books that started to be published. One of the new developments in Europe during the Enlightenment was the introduction of philosophes and salons.

Libraries encourage reading, spread ideas that ultimately create a social unity. In fact, libraries have been found in the 1730s by Benjamin Franklin. He believed libraries would be a place to access and share information. (Source A) No matter the changes societies are going through, libraries are still developing. This simply gives the hope that even our future would hold libraries to serve a role in education. Libraries also stimulate reading

In the Middle Ages, children were treated as an adult in the family. Children went out to work just as the parents did to help provide for the good of the family and to provide for the family’s needs, whether it was economically or material based. The prosperity of the family came first. Because of this, many children were unable to read and were not provided with a formal education. They were provided with the education that was needed to survive everyday life and the education of religious beliefs. Books at this time cost too much for the common family to own, and were very rare at this time in history. In 1476 William Claxton was credited with learning the printing trade and taking it back to England with him and setting up a printing press at Westminster. From there he published 106 books of various genres. The books were put together with excellence, but were very costly, because of this they were owned mainly by the wealthy. (Kiefer, 2010, p.69) It is visible at this point to see how valuable the printing press really was. Due to the high expense that books were in this time, many did not own books because they could not afford them. Others would trade their valuable land or property to own a single book.

Voltaire’s masterpiece has been read delightfully and with much interest by many people since its scarcely secret publication in Geneva and Paris (1759). When it was first published, there were about twenty copies, most of which were pirated. When Voltaire died (1778) there were already more than fifty, and later on it became the best seller of the eighteenth century.

In the Victorian and then Edwardian’s England, magazines directed to young readers had a central place in society. Reasons explaining this situation were numerous, for example the industrialization and the decreasing price of paper played an important part in the phenomenon. But one of the most important reasons was social reforms concerning education. Following a European global movement, the 1870’s Education Act in England had a strong impact to give and a universal and free access to primary school. This reform had important repercussions on publishers which seen in the juvenile market, a market in expansion ready to be exploited. Even before the 1870’s Education Act, religious structures and associations such as The Sunday School Movement were charged to teach young boys and girls to read. Therefore magazines and periodicals dealing with religious and evangelical contents appeared in the first quarter of the 19th century. For example in 1805, William Loyd created The Youth’s Magazine, or, Evangelical Miscellany. The aim here was to provide children of both sex with Christian and moral contents. William Lloyd asking the magazine’s contributors at the time to provide: "biographical communications, essays, obituaries of young people, extracts from scripture history, remarks on passages of scripture, anecdotes, poetry, or with

The nineteenth century was a period of controversy, reform, and revolution. Among it were people longing to spread new ideas, discover new things, and find who they truly were. Though the desires of those in this time were not entirely contrastive to the ones of those in any other century, differences lie in the difficulty nineteenth century people faced in fulfilling said desires. This is not to say that people of the time lacked ambition—in fact, this is to say the exact opposite. Despite their abundance of ambition, contrary to current times, people were often suppressed from using their ambition to promote ideas that were considered socially unacceptable. Though there are many pieces of evidence to support this, multiple literary works

Pressing to Print in the Renaissance Since books came to be, humans have looked to literature to aid them in understanding the world around them, whether it be reading or storytelling. During the Renaissance, people began to study the Bible and other publications from the period and formed their own opinions towards everything, which wouldn’t have been possible without books. Guttenberg’s invention of the printing press’ mechanism expanded the reach of knowledge to people of every social class by allowing individuals to educate themselves and indirectly fomenting the ideas of the renaissance.

Johannes Gutenberg invented the first movable-printing press in the fifteenth century. The printing press affected Europe’s political, cultural, economic, and social development in the centuries that followed. According to Reader, “The eighteenth century saw a rapid expansion in the publication of books, periodicals, and pamphlets, which allowed wide dissemination of these new ideas, and with that, the early stages of public opinion” (24). The availability of paper and spreading of books, allowed various classes of people, many of whom had not previously been exposed to books, to read and interpret different ideas and publication. Access to different points of views caused tension between those in power and the lower classes. One specific example was the access to the Bible, which led to the lower classes questioning the foundations of the Church. In addition, the spread of ideas and power to publish their individual thoughts led to Enlightenment thinking and increased individualism. The idea that people should learn from their own experiences and learn to challenge what they are taught and search for real facts, made living in Europe with an educated, self-governing public possible.

Voltaire was a rebellious and radical thinker, whose sharp wit and pointed satire drew the ire of critics who say he disrespected the orthodoxy of church and state, and won the respect of a growing rationalist movement that had emerged out of the public sphere in Europe between the 17th and 18th centuries. Although Voltaire is known today for being a philosophical powerhouse, whose writing is the stuff of legend, for most of his life he only wrote plays, poems, and novels. It wasn’t until he was almost forty in 1733 that he published his first major philosophical work, “Letters Concerning the English Nation.” This was a series of letters that describe the customs, cultures and great men of England, and even though his praise for England, a country “where all the arts are honored and rewarded,” and where one could think “free and nobly without being held back by any servile fear,” may be overblown, they are important nonetheless, because it highlights the virtues that an Enlightened society should strive for. (114) In many ways these were not so much love letters to England, as much as they were a call for the rest of Europe to progress in the rationalist movement that England had set the tone for.