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Reading Home Cultures Through Books
Kirsti Salmi-Niklander
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This wide-ranging, comparative, and multidisciplinary collection addresses

the significance of books in creating the idea of home. The chapters present
cases that reveal the affective and sensory dimensions of books and reading
in the practice of everyday life of individuals, in communities, and in society.
The complex relationship of books, reading, and home is explored through
American and European case studies both in bourgeois and middle-class
homes, and in working-class and immigrant families and communities with
limited possibilities for reading. The volume combines the conceptions and
representations of domesticity, the materiality of reading, and library as
a place, drawing on book history and material culture studies as well as
anthropology and sociology of the home.
Kirsti Salmi-Niklander is a Senior Lecturer in Folklore Studies in the

Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki, Finland.
Marija Dalbello is a Professor of Information Studies in the School of Com-

munication and Information, Rutgers University, USA.
Home
Series editors: Rosie Cox and Victor Buchli
This interdisciplinary series responds to the growing interest in the home

as an area of research and teaching. The titles feature contributions from
across the social sciences, including anthropology, material culture studies,
architecture and design, sociology, gender studies, migration studies, and
environmental studies. Relevant to students as well as researchers, the series
consolidates the home as a field of study.
A Cultural History of Twin Beds

Hilary Hinds
Art and Masculinity in Post-War Britain

Reconstructing Home
Gregory Salter
Food Identities at Home and on the Move

Explorations at the Intersection of Food, Belonging and Dwelling
Edited by Raúl Matta, Charles-Édouard de Suremain, and Chantal Crenn
Ethnographies of Home and Mobility

Shifing Roofs
Alejandro Miranda Nieto, Aurora Massa, and Sara Bonfanti
Globalising Housework
Domestic Labour in Middle-class London Homes, 1850–1914
Laura Humphreys
Home Improvement in Aotearoa New Zealand and the UK

Rosie Cox

Edited by Kirsti Salmi-Niklander and Marija Dalbello
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Home/book-series/BLANTHOME
Reading Home Cultures
Through Books
Edited by
Kirsti Salmi-Niklander and
Marija Dalbello
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Kirsti Salmi-Niklander and
Marija Dalbello; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Kirsti Salmi-Niklander and Marija Dalbello to
be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of
the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-367-68913-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-68916-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-13959-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003139591
Typeset in Sabon
by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
Contents
List of figures vii

Acknowledgments ix
List of contributors x
Introduction: How to read home cultures through books 1

MARIJA DALBELLO AND KIRSTI SALMI-NIKLANDER
PART I
Histories 11
1 Immigrants being at home in libraries: how the immigrants

brought their home to the New York Public Library 13
MARIJA DALBELLO
2 Literacy, ABC books, and primary readers in Finnish

immigrant homes and communities in the US 36
KIRSTI SALMI-NIKLANDER
3 “A parade of home”: representations of home in Greek

American community albums 57
MARIA KALIAMBOU
PART II
Transformations 79
4 Books and the creation of the middle-class home in

American nineteenth-century domestic fiction 81
JOHANNA MCELWEE
vi Contents
5 Simulating domestic space in 1990s technoculture:
Timothy Leary’s virtual home library 96
JAMES A. HODGES
6 Bookshelves create a cozy atmosphere: affective and

emotional materiality in bookreading practices 111
ANNA KAJANDER
PART III
L’envoi 127
7 Writing home cultures through books at the time of

the pandemic 129
Patience and Fortitude, in the first person (Marija Dalbello) 129
My library as a second home (Kirsti Salmi-Niklander) 131
Touching the books (Maria Kaliambou) 132
My bookcase, my anchor, or some reflections on my (Zoom)
background (Johanna McElwee) 133
What we lose when we work from home (James A. Hodges) 135
Listening to books through lockdown (Anna Kajander) 137
Index 139
Figures
1.1 “Seward Park Roof reading room” (ca. 1910). From The
New York Public Library. 24
1.2 “Seward Park Children in library” (ca. 1910). From The
New York Public Library. 25
1.3 “Seward Park Students pictured at depleted American
History shelf” (ca. 1910). From The New York Public Library. 26
2.1 Page 3 in Kuva-aapinen: Lasten ensimmäistä opetusta
varten (1912), Hancock (MI.): [publisher unknown].
Printed in Finnish-Lutheran publishing company’s press.
Illustrations Alex Federley. National Library, Finland. 42
2.2 Page 4 in Kuva-aapinen: Lasten ensimmäistä opetusta
varten (1912), Hancock (MI.): [publisher unknown].
Printed in Finnish-Lutheran publishing company’s press.
Illustrations Alex Federley. National Library, Finland. 46
2.3 Page 5 in Aapinen (1920), [Place unknown]: Amerikan
suomalaisten sosialististen kustannusliikkeiden liitto.
Illustrations Kaarlo A. Suvanto. National Library, Finland. 47
2.4 Pages 40–41 in Aapinen (1920), [Place
unknown]: Amerikan suomalaisten sosialististen
kustannusliikkeiden liitto. Illustrations Kaarlo A.
Suvanto. National Library, Finland. 48
2.5 Pages 38–39 in Aapinen (1920), [Place
unknown]: Amerikan suomalaisten sosialististen
kustannusliikkeiden liitto. Illustrations Kaarlo A.
Suvanto. National Library, Finland. 49
3.1 Saint Barbara Greek Orthodox Church, Orange,
Connecticut, 1919–2019. 61
3.2 Andros Society, New York 1931. Kaireios Library,
Andros, Greece. 67
3.3 Saint Spyridon Hellenic Orthodox Church 1917–2017.
Generations of Faith and Tradition. Palos Heights, Illinois, 2018. 70
5.1 Web interface for the “Library” section of Leary.com,
circa 1996–1997 (Timothy’s Library; The Archives, 1997) 97
viii Figures
5.2 Web interface for the “Archives” shelf depicted in Figure
5.1 (Timothy’s Library; The Archives [Close-Up View of
“Archives” Shelf], 1997) 97
5.3 Example of digital photography simulating wraparound
view of Leary’s domestic space via Leary.com (Timothy’s
TV Room; Archives, 1997) 105
Acknowledgments
The idea for this book originated from the panel, “Books Create a Home:
Exploring Books and Reading as Domestic Symbols and Rituals” convened
by Kirsti Salmi-Niklander and Silja Juopperi at the SIEF (Société Interna-
tionale d’Ethnologie et de Folklore) Congress at the University of Göttingen
March 26–30, 2017.
Contributors
Marija Dalbello is a Professor of Information Studies in the School of

Communication and Information at Rutgers University. Her teaching
and publications focus on the history of knowledge, epistemologies of the
senses, history of the book, and immigrant literacies. Her co-edited col-
lections include Visible Writings: Cultures, Forms, Readings, with Mary
Shaw; A History of Modern Librarianship: Constructing the Heritage
of Western Cultures, with Wayne A. Wiegand and Pamela Spence
Richards; and a special issue of Information Research “Archaeology and
Information Research”, with Isto Huvila, Ixchel Faniel, Costis Dallas,
and Michael Olsson.
James A. Hodges studies the history and materiality of text technologies,
with a particular focus on archives and preservation. He is currently a
Fred M. Bullard Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Texas
at Austin’s School of Information. James earned his Ph.D. from Rutgers
University in 2020.
Anna Kajander is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of History
and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She currently works on
a project Sensory and Material Memories: Exploring Autobiographical
Materiality (www.sensomemo.fi). Her dissertation (University of
Helsinki, 2020) focused on readers’ experiences toward digitalization of
books and reading practices.
Maria Kaliambou is a Senior Lector at the Hellenic Studies Program, Yale
University. She earned her Ph.D. in European Ethnology/Folklore Studies
at the University of Munich, Germany. Her research focuses on the dia-
logue between folklore and book history, particularly in the diaspora.
Also, she is interested in foreign language pedagogy.
Johanna McElwee is a Senior Lecturer in English at Uppsala University,
Sweden, and the author of The Nation Conceived: Learning, Education,
and Nationhood in American Historical Novels of the 1820s (2005). She
has published articles in the European Journal of American Studies and
Notes and Queries.
Contributors xi
Kirsti Salmi-Niklander is a Senior Lecturer in Folklore Studies at Department
of Cultures, University of Helsinki. Her long-term fields of interest
include vernacular literacy, oral history research, working-class culture,
and immigrant culture. One of her recent publications is Handwritten
Newspapers. An Alternative Medium during the Early Modern and
Modern Periods (co-edited with Heiko Droste), Studia Fennica Historica
26, Finnish Literature Society 2019.
Introduction
How to read home cultures
through books
Marija Dalbello and Kirsti Salmi-Niklander
The chapters in this book address the idea of home for individuals and com-
munities, and locational epistemologies characterized by the presence of
books. Originating from the ethnography as placemaking that has shaped
recent approaches to the studies of home, this collection of chapters com-
bines the materiality of reading with the conceptions and representations
of domesticity. The chapters focus on the affective and sensory dimensions
of books and reading in the practices of everyday life of individuals, in
communities, and in society. While the authors explore specific empirical
and historical places in which reading of home cultures through books
emerges, they also examine the stability and instability of the concept of
home, revealed through relocation of meanings, but also in the transforma-
tions of the book itself. The studies of private and public libraries and the
symbolic-ritualized aspects of literacy and reading in cultural communities
address the interactions of self and subjectivity of individuals as well as
national and transnational cultures of the book.
Our shared argument is the significance of books in creating the notion of
home as a transactional concept. This perspective opens a new field of study
about the sites of reading and reading as a practice of everyday life. The
materiality of the book becomes an entry point to imagination, comfort,
familiarity, safety, and intimacy but also friction and tensions in a critical
reading of book cultures. The chapters present the stories of the book as
mediators of memories and their presence in the community histories, in
aspirational and imagined homes, and in terms of access to literacy in the
context of libraries and urban communities/environments. The historical
orders of the book in this collection cover a span between the nineteenth
and the twenty-first centuries, focusing on actual and imagined communi-
ties in the context of migration, domesticity, and everyday life but also the
digital imaginary of home and technocultural simulations of home.
Books and home cultures: methodological perspectives

The following section summarizes some of the earlier research about the
relationship between the home, reading, and libraries in the lives of indi-
viduals and communities. The increasingly influential affective-sensorial
DOI: 10.4324/9781003139591-1
2 Marija Dalbello and Kirsti Salmi-Niklander
approach has been drawing on the ethnographies of reading (Boyarin 1993).
This methodology has not limited its focus on home and domesticity in the
classic sense. Connecting class to literacy and book cultures within home
libraries draws attention to how the home is not only a space of domesticity
but also a place of becoming. Reading in the home resonates with us par-
ticularly strongly because the idea of home includes domesticity but is not
necessarily synonymous with a stable place of dwelling.
We are contributing to the idea of home and to an ongoing, “interdisci-
plinary dialogue of thinking home,” as noted in the title of Thinking Home
edited by Petrić and Bahun (2019). Being bound at home during the pan-
demic engages further paradoxes of the heart as we contemplate migration
crises, increasing homelessness, and the multiple senses of home. The books
on domestic space reveal increased attention on materiality of home and
design (Bille 2019) and the importance of using ethnographic approaches as
“methods for researching homes” and studying books in homes (Pink 2015;
Pink, Leder Mackley, Morosanu, Mitchell & Bhamra 2017). The concep-
tualizations of home have been presented through methodological explora-
tions in interdisciplinary case studies (Petrić & Bahun 2019).
Michel de Certeau’s classic theoretical and methodological blueprint for
the study of practices of everyday life has inspired us to focus on the empir-
ical encounters of home and reading in a number of contexts in everyday
life. De Certeau has analyzed the spatial dimensions of neighborhoods, the
activities surrounding domesticity and consumption (de Certeau, Giard &
Mayol 1998) and reading as poaching (de Certeau 1984).
The broad array of topics, methodologies, and disciplinary approaches in
this volume has expanded on the ideas of books and home and reading in
particular, but also libraries in community neighborhoods. Sigfried Giedion
has pointed to the material dimensions and the social logic of human spaces
that situates collections of books in homes within a larger society that artic-
ulates material spaces (1977). Kristina Lundblad considers books as objects
and their meaning in the aesthetics of bourgeois home. She situates “the
book as furniture, the home as narrative” theoretically and historically
through iconographies of home and reading in visual arts and literature
(2015: 222–34). The idea of home is epitomized in the works of archi-
tectural historians focusing on the material and political consequences of
space (Rybczynski 1987). In this collection, we emphasize material dimen-
sions of books in the site of home.
A range of cultural practices and microanalyses open up the space of
studying such material logic as a type of a cultural text, and the social pro-
cesses tied to class, with a bourgeois home as an offspring of that tradition.
Home libraries have a long tradition as topics of study. The history of home
libraries within an architectural framework (Gwynn 2010) is expanded
comparatively by involving the studies of the material environments and
architecture (Bille 2019). The previous literature of home and books focuses
on house libraries and collecting. They are often associated in the surveys
of elite libraries in the genre of luxurious books that convey romantic ideas
How to read home cultures 3
of homes. Home libraries are found as the context for luxurious displays of
books in often profusely illustrated volumes, as exemplified in Mark Pur-
cell’s “country house libraries” (2017).
Strikingly contrary tone is the critical approach in which populations
such as immigrants represented by studies of ordinary reading and rep-
resentations of literacy “from below” have developed iconographies of
reading and books in the home. Martyn Lyons has studied the reading prac-
tices of British and French working-class autodidacts during the nineteenth
century. Many of these “ordinary readers” started with “indiscriminate and
eclectic reading” and obtained their reading material by borrowing from
“friends, neighbors, priests and schoolteachers” (Lyons 2008: 116–17). The
pioneering Ethnography of Reading edited by Jonathan Boyarin (1993) and
the iconographies of women readers in the essay contributed by Elizabeth
Long (1993) draw attention to the intimacy of reading and home, often
connecting literacy to class and situating specific book cultures within the
women’s spaces and domesticity. The iconography of the book and images
of medieval women as writers and readers is discussed in the Women and
the Book collection edited by Smith and Taylor (1996), notably in Sandra
Penketh’s essay focusing on silent reading and books of hours as intimate
spaces for private prayer and contemplation (1996). The culture within the
home-assembled libraries that emphasize the social consequences of read-
ing are representative of the “culture of success” in the United States con-
text (Blair 2012).
Rachel Lyn Noorda’s study of material contexts at the intersection of read-
ing habits and identity in Scottish diasporic readers as an audience for her-
itage culture exemplifies an approach to the study of books standing in for
the culture of imagined home cultures (2016: 200–11). Her focus is on the
response of Scottish diaspora readers and the marketing of books as symbols
of Scottishness and the Scottish “home” or as a personalized symbol of tradi-
tion (exemplified by language and landscape) (Noorda 2016: 210). Boccagni
(2017) has explored the intersection of the practices and perceptions of home
as part of the experience of international labor migrants in the search of
aspirational and future homes. The “search of home” can be the search of
the home experience of security, familiarity, and control that migrants create
in the process of self-representation and expression of social identity (ibid.:
7). This process Boccagni calls “homing.” It pertains to the material practices
in everyday life of migrants in which they build special social relationships,
attained as part of their condition of mobility (ibid.: xxiii).
Histories, transformations, and reflections

The first section, HISTORIES, focuses on the experiences of those who had
limited access to books. The three chapters in this section address the read-
ing practices of immigrants and in immigrant communities. They include
the replacement of home in libraries for the European immigrants in New
York City in the early twentieth century (Marija Dalbello), the images of
home, books, and literacy in an analysis of Finnish American immigrant
primers (Kirsti Salmi-Niklander), and anthologizing the home in the case
of an immigrant community’s genre of print, the photographic community
album (Maria Kaliambou). Each essay examines the complex relationship
of books, reading, and home for the working-class and immigrant families
and in communities with limited opportunities for reading. Their emphasis
is on transnational immigrant and diasporic communities including Finnish
Americans, Greek Americans, and the communities from the cosmopolitan
melting pot of American urbanity in New York City. The chapters present
cases that represent approaches to the history and ethnography of the book
as well as visual analysis and material studies, drawing on archival sources,
texts, and images in these specific book genres. They address the histori-
cal experience of migration from Europe and the experiences of home and
homelessness, of dwelling in two homes, and virtual and historical concep-
tions of domesticity.
The second part, TRANSFORMATIONS, explicitly reveals the affective
and sensory dimensions of books and reading in the practice of everyday
life of individuals and the transformation of the book (Anna Kajander), the
home imaginaries, and simulation of domestic space in the 1990s techno-
culture, focusing on virtuality (James A. Hodges), alongside literary rep-
resentations of domesticity and class (Johanna McElwee). The chapters
explore the boundaries of work/home and private/public spaces and how
books were featured in the design of domesticity, and the gendered, class,
and ideological politics of the private sphere.
The temporal-historical leap ranges from the nineteenth-century realist
literary representations to the late twentieth-century imaginaries and the
current transformations and migration of the book. Together these analyses
address the cultural experience of reading through and with the transfor-
mations of the book. Books as material and emotional objects are located
in the context of home, employing ethnographic, narrative, and forensic
archival approaches.
The concluding section, L’ENVOI, honors the passing of the coronavi-
rus year 2020–2021. We include the contributors’ accounts reflecting on
the pandemic during which the editing of the collection took place as the
final collective chapter. We show here the convergent experience within our
localized settings of writing and the authors’ biographical contexts. Collect-
ing the experienced and lived ideas of home and books, written by the con-
tributors, crystalizes the idea of home and books that were sharply brought
into focus during the lockdowns in a series of reflections in the first person.
Each exposé outlines a setting and the scene for experiencing the historical
moment from which this book emerged. That intersection of authorial posi-
tions contextualizes the essays and the core thematic of this volume.
Among the contributing essays that emphasize the ubiquitous experience
of reading, books, and home, several focus on transnational and American-
ist topics, addressing the culture and literature of immigrant communities
who settled in North America. Marija Dalbello discusses in her chapter how
the library can be a home and questions the idea of library as a building
where people can find peace, shelter, isolation, or intimacy in the context of
reading and books on institutions’ terms. She depicts the library as a place
where immigrants can accomplish their quest for identity or citizenship, or
where they draw connection to the old and imagined homes on their own
terms, by changing the institution itself.
The cultures of the book in historical immigrant communities in the
essays by Kirsti Salmi-Niklander and Maria Kaliambou invite us to the
world of printed books as material objects and as discursive spaces within
which the home cultures are explored. Salmi-Niklander’s study of Finnish
American primers and the multiple relations across the transatlantic sites
(in Finland and in the United States and across the political ideologies)
reveal a world of immigrant communities in which books in the Finnish
language maintained connections between generations and served as tools
for cultural interaction. Homeschooling was a vital practice in immigrant
families and communities. Kaliambou situates another genre of immigrant
book culture, the community album, within its local contexts and transat-
lantic connections. These albums represent memory systems for local and
village communities of diaspora Greek communities.
The contributions by Johanna McElwee and Marija Dalbello share a
focus on domesticity. From the nineteenth-century American middle-class
culture (McElwee), domesticity is re-situated in the context of Progressive
era librarianship and in the material cultures of the library spaces (Dalbello),
sharing an aspirational ethos of books as commodities and material objects.
The “cozy” feeling of books and their materiality that originates in the ethos
of domesticity but also the phenomenological dimensions of experiencing
material objects and the digital forms are contrasted and differentiated by
Anna Kajander and James A. Hodges, both of whom connect their studies to
the virtual space within which home, books, and reading can be sited.
While there are complementary, comparative, and contrasting dimen-
sions in the chapters that allow links to be established in the conceptualiza-
tions of home, they also employ a range of research methods and materials.
Home cultures are studied through books as material and discursive objects
(Kaliambou, McElwee, Salmi-Niklander), through written autobiographic
collections (Kajander), through institutional documents (Dalbello), and
through private archives (Hodges).
The spaces studied in our collection carry a sense of safety, managing the
tensions between public and private retreat and ideas of home as a mirror
of the world. These spaces include a bourgeois home, a library, a created
vision, and memory replicated virtually, or the parallel world created by
an immigrant community in their home language. Home and community
libraries are social and performative spaces related to class, generation, and
ethnicity. The sentiments of being at home—tied to books, reading, librar-
ies, or communities—appear in the constructions of belonging in which the
notions of the book are instrumental. Our collection outlines a wide-rang-
ing multidisciplinary study of locational dimensions featuring the idea of
books and the theorizations of “home” in terms of locational attributes (e.g.
home country, home community, the aspirational ideas of the self, and what
a home could be).
At the time of writing

In the planning of this volume, we noted a growing interest in the analog
book at the time when digital culture has gained on the meanings as the
ubiquitous presence in everyday life. The book thus becomes a visible and
grounding object. Our collection counters the current discourse of a “crisis
of the book” by focusing on the vitality of books, the places and spaces of
reading, and how reading is re-envisioned within the digital world. We are
presenting the emerging perspectives of the book as an object that attracts
affective-sensory responses. The essays unfold an idea of the book and its
experience as a sensory object, knowledge machine, and the creator of order.
The existing conversation and a newly found awareness and bracketing
of the books in homes, home libraries, and bookshelves in the virtualized
homes has been mediated during the COVID-19 pandemic. They are also
expressed in a burst of cultural artifacts and commentaries on how the
images of home and books have been mediated through virtual platforms,
within geometrically defined, rectangular, anything-spaces of a Zoom vir-
tual window, often revealing authentic home libraries or staged shelved
presence of books in homes.
A Twitter account Bookcase Credibility with the motto “What you say
is not as important as the bookcase behind you” reached instant celebrity
in April 2020, with 1,032 posts and 119,000 Twitter followers (on April
25, 2021). The account captured a feeling of that time and a realization
that global lockdowns limited movement. It offered humorous relief. Main-
stream media transferred their services online and the public gained a field
of vision constrained to homes and personal spaces.
Our new virtual life during the pandemic revealed home cultures and
home libraries in which books are representational and aspirational tech-
nologies of the self. The novelty of being relocated to experts’ homes
through media appearances involved snarky comments. The first tweet in
Bookcase Credibility (@Bcredibility tweeted on April 22, 2020) reveals the
ontology of the bookshelves. The rectangle of visibility announced intent
through iconic bookshelves:
Rachel Reeves has taken no chances here. Everything is bookcase. No

gap has been left where credibility might leak away. Utilising three
dimensions, sending a bookcase charging at us along a wall, leaves us
no sanctuary. We are overwhelmed, swamped by credibility.
The image takeout that was commented on was captioned, “… vulnerable

and protecting their own health–and that’s not a position that …” pos-
sibly gesturing to further ironies.1 The first commentary on a politician’s
bookshelves gave expression to the sentiment of the times. The instant
visibility of spaces within the mostly privileged middle-class individuals,
at home with their libraries, set the tone for their “credibility” in public
conversations and created assumptions that the libraries are the expres-
sions of self and the shelf as a presentation of self. Having bookshelves
filled with books appeared as a display of privilege. Often the shelves
would be stacked with self-promotional items, including the speaker’s own
book being promoted. These windows into homes and personal libraries
prompted the genre of background shelf-reading. Trope of the bookshelf
was accompanied by a hermeneutic process of entertainment, critique, or
voyeuristic pleasure. Books became emblematic of readers, self-promoters,
and a new form of hucksterism.
The iconography of the book and the personal library became ubiqui-
tous. Through a whole new genre of “library awe,” librarians got involved
through digital services. The bookshelves on Zoom and virtualized homes,
the “Covid journals” and other reading and writing practices, virtual con-
ferences contemplating the distinction, became ubiquitous markers of vir-
tual domesticity and iconographies of material culture, joining an abundant
literature of books about books and libraries. The home libraries in domes-
tic settings have rarely been considered with such intensity. The scholarly
community responded with virtual conferences, libraries transferred their
services online, even a renewed passion for libraries emerged across the dis-
ciplines. The intersubjective feeling of books from material spaces that were
mediated in the pandemic Zoom windows during the broadcasts in 2020
and 2021 can be interpreted as a melancholy moment of disappearance of
the materiality of books.
The atmosphere of home in the virtual settings projected to the pub-
lic from the actual homes recalled trends in bookstore design and coffee
houses introducing the feeling of personal library for atmosphere at the
end of the 1990s. Designing the spaces for reading in bookstores and coffee
houses was a cultural counter-text. The dystopian narrative of the material
books was prompted by the closing of local bookstores in response to the
rise of large chain conglomerates (Squires 2007: 27–34; Stevenson 2019:
219–30). The design of bookstores and coffee houses was parallel with the
transformation of the book trade, the disappearance of small publishers,
and the emergence of bookselling megastores.
Enduring paradoxical dimensions of material books and home can be
recognized in the historical staging of the intersections of books and home
as two powerful symbolic spaces. The elegiac and dystopian discourse from
the early 1990s, focusing on the dearth and death of the book and read-
ing, exemplified by Sven Birkerts’ The Gutenberg Elegies (1994), reached
its apotheosis in these further paradoxes surrounding the personal book
spaces and libraries, now re-signified through displays of bookishness in
the virtual spaces. The loss of the boundary of work and home that Hodges
draws as a main conclusion of his essay is evocative of the kinds of “facsim-
ile” homes in virtual spaces and in bookstores simulating home libraries.
In the dystopian genres, a sense of loss with the disappearance of physical
books and reading has been expressed as a sign of moral decay in society.
While questionable, the nostalgias of the book revealed the symbolic power
of the physical spaces for reading and the cultures of the book.
The ideas of the home and books in communities lead to the library tropes
and especially the virtuous position of libraries as community homes and a
library as a social technology. The history of American librarianship recog-
nizes that public feeling in the notion of the “library faith” (Raber and Niles
Maack 1994; Raber 1997). The associations of the moral uplift that libraries
allegedly provided during the closures of library spaces can be recognized in
cliché responses exemplified by Inspiring Library Stories: Tales of Kindness,
Connection, and Community Impact (Kagan 2020), a review of which Ron
Charles published in the Washington Post Book Club Section on April 25,
2021 (Charles 2021). In these stories, libraries provided a community bond
and spaces for education, gathering, informing, and inspiring. While it is
difficult to assert how the closed library spaces could make an impact during
the pandemic, the representational strength of books, reading, and libraries
calls for theorization and research of their symbolic and the imaginary of
their activist role and social impact. That discourse points to the strong sym-
bolic dimension of libraries as community homes.
While this topical collection is aimed at a broad world of scholarship
interested in home cultures and books, study of material culture, cultural
heritage and ethnography, we hope that it will attract researchers of migra-
tion, material culture, cultural heritage, publishing, and book studies. The
ideas brought into conversation in this volume insert books and reading in
the studies of home, domestic culture, and the new fields focusing on cul-
tures of the book through materiality, affects, senses, and memory. What the
removal into virtual public domestic spaces revealed are the paradoxes of
the book as its materiality is being affirmed and re-experienced in the home
libraries, book assemblages, and the absence of libraries as a second home.
Note
1 The takeout of an interview with British Labour politician Rachel Reeves by Sky
News.
References
Bille, M. (2019), Homely Atmospheres and Lighting Technologies in Denmark:
Living with Light, New York: Bloomsbury.
Birkerts, S. (1994), The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic
Age, Boston and London: Faber and Faber.
Blair, A. L. (2012), Reading Up: Middle-class Readers and the Culture of Success in
the Early Twentieth-century United States, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Boccagni, P. (2017), Migration and the Search for Home: Mapping Domestic Space
in Migrants’ Everyday Lives, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Boyarin, J. (ed) (1993), The Ethnography of Reading, Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Charles, R. (2021), Review of “Inspiring Library Stories: Tales of Kindness, Connection,
and Community Impact” by Oleg Kagan, Washington Post, April 25.
de Certeau, M. (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of
California Press.
de Certeau, M., L. Giard, and P. Mayol (1998), The Practice of Everyday Life:
Volume 2: Living and Cooking, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Giedion, S. (1977), Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition,
5th ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gwynn, L. (2010), “The Architecture of the English Domestic Library, 1600–1700,”
Library & Information History 26 (1): 56–69.
Kagan, O. (2020), Inspiring Library Stories: Tales of Kindness, Connection, and
Community Impact, Los Angeles, California: Hinchas Press.
Long, E. (1993), “Textual Interpretation as Collective Action,” in J. Boyarin (ed),
The Ethnography of Reading, Berkeley: University of California Press, 180–211.
Lundblad, K. (2015), Bound to be Modern: Publishers’ Cloth Bindings and the
Material Culture of the Book, 1840–1914, Tr. A. Crozier, New Castle, DE: Oak
Knoll Press.
Lyons, M. (2008), Reading Culture and Writing Practices in Nineteenth-Century
France, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Noorda, R. L. (2016), Transnational Scottish Book Marketing to a Diasporic
Audience 1995–2015. Unpublished dissertation. University of Stirling, PhD in
Publishing Studies.
Penketh, S. (1996), “Women and Books of Hours,” in L. Smith and J.H.M. Taylor
(eds), Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, London and Toronto:
The British Library and University of Toronto Press, 266–81.
Petrić, B. and S. Bahun (eds) (2019), Thinking Home. Interdisciplinary Dialogues,
New York: Bloomsbury.
Pink, S. (2015), Doing Sensory Ethnography, 2nd edition. Los Angeles: Sage
Publications.
Pink, S., K. Leder Mackley, R. Morosanu, V Mitchell, and T. Bhamra (eds) (2017),
Making Homes: Ethnography and Design, New York: Bloomsbury.
Purcell, M. (2017), The Country House Library, New Haven: Published for the
National Trust by Yale University Press.
Raber, D. (1997), Librarianship and Legitimacy: The Ideology of the Public Library
Inquiry, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Raber, D. and M. Niles Maack (1994), “Scope, Background, and Intellectual Context
of the Public Library Inquiry,” Libraries & Culture, 29 (1): 26–48.
Rybczynski, W. (1987), Home: A Short History of an Idea, New York: Penguin Books.
Smith, L. and J.H.M. Taylor (eds) (1996), Women and the Book: Assessing the
Visual Evidence, London and Toronto: The British Library and University of
Toronto Press.
Stevenson, I. (2019), “Distribution and Bookselling,” in A. Nash, C. Squires, I. A.
Willison (eds), Cambridge History of the Book: Volume 7. The Twentieth Century
and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 191–230.
Squires, C. (2007), Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in
Britain, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Part I
Histories
1 Immigrants being at home in libraries
How the immigrants brought their home
to the New York Public Library
Marija Dalbello
The New York metropolitan area has been a place upon which generations
of immigrants and exiles have been “prospecting for a future home – forever
looking at alien land as land that could conceivably become [theirs]” (Aciman
1999: 13). This chapter situates a genealogy of belonging and home for
immigrants in New York City by focusing on the activities of the New York
Public Library (NYPL) in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
The shaping of citizenship through literacy activities and the services for
immigrants was an imperative at the core of the melting-pot ideology shap-
ing the American assimilation effort. The sanctioned versions of American
citizenship involved domesticated, literate immigrants and the library as a
place of belonging. These models of belonging were shaped by immigrant/
library interactions around material culture of reading spaces and books—
as liminal places of the immigrants’ engagement with the Library.
The spatial syntax of the city that involves a broad topography of parks,
streets, and neighborhoods includes libraries as contact zones for the man-
ifestation of “home,” the places of belonging, familiarity, and comfort
among many urban public spaces that one may inhabit. Those spaces carry
an “essence of the notion of home” and being at home where “an entire
past comes to dwell in a new house” by means of imagination and thought
(Bachelard [1958] 1994: 5). They allow for the creation of the “spatial sto-
ries” and “itineraries” that organize the everyday life of individuals and the
city as an inhabited world (de Certeau 1984: 115).
Library services for immigrants during the Progressive era in

American history
Being at home in libraries is tied to a long history of library services for
immigrants, which were established during the peak migration from Europe
to America at the turn of the twentieth century when the libraries welcomed
the second-wave settler immigrants (Dalbello 2017: 29). The emergent ser-
vices for immigrant communities were discussed at the time in The Library
Journal, Public Libraries, and the Bulletin of the American Library Asso-
ciation including the testimonials from librarians nationwide about their
work with immigrants. Some advocated for inclusion of materials in the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003139591-3
14 Marija Dalbello
languages of the users within an Americanization program. The “modern
library principle” of serving communities with translations of English and
American authors in their native tongue prompted questions in the media
space such as, “Why Should American Citizens be Taxed to Print and Buy
Books in a Foreign Language for the Entertainment of Persons Supposed
to be Citizens in the Rough?” (Gaillard 1903: 67).1 The nature of desired
relationship between immigrants’ literacy and the public library was exem-
plified by a discussion of the so-called “East Side reading” (referring to
the Lower East Side of Manhattan) that was characterized by a distinction
between the “older school” and “the modern school” readers. For the for-
mer, the librarians would be tasked “to get them away from their serious
ideas” (and their home-language reading) and to “provide books which give
American ideas and ideals” in their language (Gaillard 1904: 84–5). The
immigrant readers were often a puzzling presence for the librarians. The
“natural timidity of foreigners” in the library, “apt to be awed” by the fea-
tures of library spaces and their “modesty in making demands” librarians
partly attributed to their former habituation in “despotic” regimes (Hrbek
1910: 102). Between 1903 and 1910, the discussion of “how to provide
services to immigrant communities” was “advancing beyond the provision
of books either in English or in other languages,” to the expansion of ser-
vices for circulating materials to foreign-born populations (Novotny 2003:
345). In the address at the 1916 Asbury Park library conference, one library
leader emphasized the importance of libraries in opening a door to Ameri-
can life for the immigrants aspiring to citizenship. These aspirations offered
the justification for creating the services for the immigrant populations and
making them into citizens. He built his speech from testimonials of librar-
ians who worked with the immigrants that allowed him to identify the
immigrants’ subject positions, as in this excerpt of an interaction between
an immigrant and a librarian: “‘Before we had these books, our evenings
were like nights in a jail,’ said an Italian in a hill town of Massachusetts.
‘You mean that I can take these books home? You trust me?’ asked a poor
fellow of a Chicago librarian. ‘If I tell that in Russia, they no belief me’”
(Carr 1916: 152). By describing a mixture of the immigrants’ desire for
books alongside their “awe” of the library, John Foster Carr justified the
ethos of librarians’ Americanization activism. That attitude was a mix-
ture of “sympathy” (helping turn immigrants into democratic citizens) and
“fear” (of failing to domesticate them) (Novotny 2003: 343).
At the start of the twentieth century, the discourse and material prac-
tices of immigrant/library interactions were guided by an ideology aimed at
migrant labor that shaped the position of the library leaders and the mis-
sion of libraries. The period between the “protest of the railroad workers
in 1877, to the final repression of the Industrial Workers of the World in
1917” placed not only politicians and businessmen but also library leaders
in a defensive position—at that time, “most chief librarians insisted [that
it] was the librarians’ job to provide the quality literature that would coun-
teract the dangerous ignorance of the workers” (Garrison 1979: 43, 45).
Immigrants being at home in libraries 15
Instead of expressing direct fears of the rebellious labor or poverty, they
created the reading places open for the immigrants to be safety valves for
expression and a social machine for their domestication.
The library as a replacement home and “citizenship machine”

In the NYPL context, the library services established for immigrants in the
early twentieth century included the provision of books in the languages of
the foreign-born populations and citizenship services, the outreach to immi-
grant communities through a system of branch libraries and distribution of
books within a network of places across the boroughs. For example, a large
traveling library system operating from the central branch was known as
the Travelling Libraries from 1901, and later, the Extension Division grew
to 800 individual points within a decade (Bulletin 1913: 162). The Travel-
ling Libraries served factories, hospitals, prisons, workhouses, churches, and
educational settings including Sunday schools, elementary and high schools
as well as army posts, merchant marine vessels, individual homes. Services
to immigrants were integrated into the network of Travelling Libraries and
the NYPL branches.
These NYPL services to immigrants had an enduring impact for over
a century and adapted to serve the newly arriving immigrant groups and
established ethnic communities. The NYPL still offers “Immigrant Services”
for “most recent immigrants” through (1) free programs in the local library
branches “related to work and life skills development as well as cultural
and recreational presentations through local partnerships, volunteers, or
contracted performers for people of all ages”; (2) resources and services for
non-English speakers including language classes to learn and improve Eng-
lish, legal assistance for citizenship; and (3) World Languages collections
that “serve and reflect the local immigrant community.” The website presents
the NYPL as a site welcoming and celebrating the City’s multicultural diver-
sity with this statement:
There are an estimated 8.5 million people living in New York City, and
approximately 37% of that population—over three million people—are
born outside of the United States. Approximately 6-in-10 New Yorkers
are immigrants or the children of immigrants. The Bronx, Manhattan,
and Staten Island—the three boroughs served by The New York Public
Library—are home to one-third of the city’s immigrant population.2
The cosmopolitan identities of immigrants are reflected in NYPL artifacts

such as the World Languages Collection (WLC).3 The citizenship services
include the English language as a second language (ESOL), resources for
immigrants seeking legal help, and virtual citizenship classes and programs.
Information for immigrant families and non-citizen parents concerned with
deportation is not limited to the NYPL; they are now standard services in
public libraries across the United States.4
16 Marija Dalbello
The history of library services for immigrants offered in the Metropolitan
area was started in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.5 A number of
independent free public libraries established throughout New York City in
the last quarter of the nineteenth century through philanthropic efforts were
meant to exert a “civilizing and uplifting influence upon the masses,” be “a
neutralizer of radical ideas,” and provide means for the lower classes to educate
themselves (Dain 1972: 29). For example, the Aguilar Free Library, founded in
1886, served mostly immigrant, Jewish and working-class “book-starved pub-
lic” with four branches on the Lower East Side of Manhattan when it was con-
solidated in the NYPL system in 1903.6 This consolidation of a system of free
circulating libraries and the incorporation of the NYPL as a non-circulating
reference and research library in 1895 was continued in the first two decades of
the twentieth century. Expansion was propelled in 1901 by Andrew Carnegie’s
gift for construction of 65 library branches across greater New York.7
According to the conventional library history of that period, “the masses
of immigrants, many non-English speaking, were generally too poor, too
timid, too sectarian, or too ignorant of urban life to initiate large public
institutions, though they did form their own organizations, sometimes with
small libraries” (Dain 1972: 29). Librarians also thought that southern and
eastern European immigrants, “especially those espousing radical ‘foreign’
ideologies—communism, socialism, anarchism—[would] be uninterested in
public libraries, a miscalculation, as experience proved” (Dain 1972: 28,
29). They entered immigrant neighborhoods:
Librarians in New York and elsewhere, viewing themselves as active

agents in the assimilation of the immigrants, considered the situation
an opportunity. They deliberately planned new branches in the centers
of foreign population and eventually launched special programs for the
inhabitants … the children and young people from immigrant families
crowded into the libraries. … These neighborhood libraries, with their
pictures and plants, quiet and gentility, offered a haven to students and
workers eager for knowledge and advancement, living in dark, con-
gested tenements where mother and children often labored all day at
cigar making or sewing and where there was no money for books or
any other luxuries. This was particularly true on the Lower East Side,
where the Slavic Jewish immigrants lived when they arrived.
(Dain 1972: 289)
Furthermore, the library leaders shared with the general public the per-
ception and concern about the immigrants’ literacy, which were directed
particularly at immigrants from rural backgrounds and Southern Europe.
However, according to the official data, nearly 70 percent of all the immi-
grants arriving in the early twentieth century were literate (Dalbello 2017:
29). The libraries were intended to be places to assimilate immigrants, as
machines for citizenship and engines for literacy. These perceptions set the
stage for understanding how the middle-class librarians imagined the places
for the new immigrants settling in the City at the start of the twentieth cen-
tury. The official publications originating from the NYPL convey an active
circulation of books in the branches serving immigrant neighborhoods and
those being brought to factories and places of work through the Travelling
Libraries program. The Library home that was created by the reformers
for the edification and betterment of immigrants overlapped with the pro-
visional tenement homes where immigrants lived their realities as laborers.
“Immigrants being at home in libraries”—their presence and

silences in the record
An analysis of the official publications, the Handbook of the New York
Public Library (further: Handbook) (1901–1921) and the Bulletin of the
New York Public Library (further: Bulletin) (1897–1920), revealed an insti-
tutional machine with meticulous record keeping. In interpreting thousands
of pages that documented the activities of the NYPL in this period, I com-
bined the interpretation of individual reports with the contextual searches
of the digitized volumes, focusing on terms related to home and migration.8
The “index test” logged the presence of particular words to reveal their
“rhetorical character” in the institutional records (Schwartz-Shea 2014:
131). This technique aided a strategic reading that revealed structures of
documentation where the absences in the record demonstrated the “silences
that enter in the production of history” (Trouillot [1995] 2015: xii). The
terms that revealed the immigrant/library interactions within a broader
library discourse were represented by these concepts: “foreign,” “home,”
and “(im)migrant(s)” and its cognate “alien(s).” (Immigrants were then also
referred to as “aliens” in less hospitable connotations of population control
and eugenics.) The NYPL’s discourse of home and migration is discussed in
the next three sections organized around these concepts.
Situating foreign-language collections and readers—Searches for

“foreign” in NYPL reports
Searches in the Bulletin and the Handbook retrieved the instances of the
word “foreign” (2,942 and 14, respectively) in reports about the library
programs, collections, and circulation statistics (in references to non-English
materials that encompassed services to immigrants). Based on the searches,
the four thematic groupings discussed next include: collecting books in
“foreign” languages; teaching “foreign” populations; reaching “foreign”
language readers and communities; and, making the library branches con-
tact grounds in “foreign” neighborhoods.
Collecting books in “foreign” languages

The use or collecting of works in “foreign” languages in the Library branches
and within the Travelling Libraries program comprised a bulk of references
18 Marija Dalbello
to “foreign”-ness in the official records. Typically, the Bulletin for 1910 (151)
claims that foreign titles were at five percent of all “home” circulations across
the 33 branches of the NYPL, with the Travelling Libraries program compris-
ing less than two percent of the overall number in over a million titles they cir-
culated that year.9 The books in foreign languages circulated in the inter-branch
loan system were predominantly in German. Other languages included French,
Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, and Russian, Danish, Latin, Swedish, Finnish, Pol-
ish, Greek, Yiddish, Hebrew, Slovak, Bohemian, Modern Greek, Arabic, and
Dutch (1910: 111). The annual report further notes a growth of the German
American collection through donated volumes and pamphlets (1910: 101).10
The reading “priority” in these languages situated the collections and their
“homeliness” in the city neighborhoods (Malpas 2006a: 36, 76).
By contrast to neighborhood branches, the foreign language materials
obtained through purchases, gifts, and exchanges worldwide were high-
lighted in the NYPL acquisition reports in the non-circulating reference col-
lection, in the Hebrew, Slavonic, and Oriental Divisions. These collections
were geared to researchers and specialists rather than the “home” languages
of New Yorkers. In reference to the uses of the Slavonic Division collection,
the Bulletin (1919) offers this framing of the priority reading:
In addition to the usual type of student and writer on Slavonic matters,

the collection was used by workers who are educating the immigrant
Russian masses in this city and its vicinity. To the journalist the Divi-
sion could offer but little, for the reason that the current literary output
of Slavonic Europe still remained practically beyond the reach of the
Library.
(1919: 133–34)
An immigrant (non-English speaker) as user of resources in their native

Slavonic language would be accidental and untypical—by contrast to a
“student and writer on Slavonic matters,” or a “journalist,” and all “work-
ers who are educating the immigrant Russian masses in this city and its
vicinity” (Bulletin 1919: 133). The literacy of the “Russian masses” in their
“home” language in this construction shows that immigrants were primar-
ily imagined within a frame defined by their quest for citizenship, their need
to be educated to become English language readers. The frame for foreign-
language collections being used by non-English language readers con-
structed collections as bridges for these readers becoming English readers.
Teaching “foreign” populations

The “foreign” titles that reached immigrant communities and working-class
readers were viewed through readers’ problematic literacy that required inter-
vention by the middle-class professionals—the teachers and the librarians.
In working with immigrants, the teachers engaged the services of the librar-
ians; the primary role of the librarians supporting teachers was in supplying
books in English. The City children’s use of the NYPL was primarily through
English language materials. However, teachers were also learning about the
operation of other educational systems from which the immigrants arrived.
For example, in the Bulletin for 1910, the “foreign” School Reference Works
included lists of “Recent Books of Interest to Teachers” that were distributed
to support teaching in the city with “the best educational works published in
France, Germany, and Italy, and exceptional books from Hungary, Bohemia,
Poland, Argentina, Chile, and Spain,”11 noting that “these foreign books are
used to a slight extent, but they are purchased for the exceptional student of
larger educational movements” (1910: 115–16).
Reaching “foreign” language readers and communities

The clusters of non-English readers can be mapped to the City’s immigrant
neighborhoods with significant foreign-born populations and their estab-
lished ethnic communities by identifying the library branches with the high-
est numbers of foreign-title circulations. In the circulation records of the
branches, the books were marked as “books for home use” or “withdrawn
for vacation reading”; in the column specifying “foreign” circulation they
were classified within sciences, arts, philosophy, and religion (Bulletin for
1910: Tables IV–VI, 151–53). For example, the German-title books intended
for home use in the Ottendorfer branch in East Village were overwhelmingly
in the category of fiction (popular titles), history, biography, travel, litera-
ture (referring to literary works), periodicals, sciences, arts, philosophy, and
religion categories (Bulletin 1910: 152). In 1909, the highest overall circula-
tion of the foreign-language titles was reported in the Ottendorfer, Rivington
Street, Yorkville, Webster, Seward (East Broadway), and Tompkins Square
branches.12 These branches were in the East Village or Lower East Side with
high concentrations of immigrant readers. While the figures refer to books,
by implication they also refer to the readers within these neighborhoods. In
2021, the Ottendorfer branch has a rarefied presence in the architecture of
East Village as an enduring material trace of once bustling German-speaking
neighborhood, signaled by its name, inscribed on a scroll above the Ottendor-
fer branch entrance reading, “Freie Bibliothek u. Lesehalle.”
In addition to reporting “foreign” circulations in the branches in the
neighborhoods, the Circulation Department distributed Lists of Books for
Adults that were available in the branches. The “Bohemian book list,” “Pol-
ish book list,” “Italian book list,” “Books for Foreigners Learning English,”
and the “Fairy Tales for Grown-up readers” were available in the branches
alongside the reading list titled, “Wanderers and Vagabonds,” which carries
an ironic resonance with the adult immigrant readers (Bulletin 1917: 911).
Making the library branches contact grounds in “foreign” neighborhoods

The librarian Anne Carroll Moore reports on her work with children and
in children’s rooms. She emphasized the training of children’s librarians,
20 Marija Dalbello
the “study of each branch in relation to its neighborhood and for a very
practical study of its book collections,” and mastering “variations in ref-
erence and reading-room work, story telling and club work, the decora-
tion of children’s rooms [as] subjects for observation and study” (Bulletin
1910: 121). Exemplifying work with immigrant groups, the provision of
children’s books in foreign languages involved native librarians and the rep-
resentatives of the communities. Discussions of children’s books in foreign
languages could be prompted, for instance, by a talk in the Webster branch
in March 1909 “by a Bohemian lady,” accompanied by an exhibit of (chil-
dren’s) books in Bohemian. The Bulletin refers to “similar accounts in the
Hungarian, Russian and Polish, and German books for children” accompa-
nied by the lists of recommendations for purchase “in districts where these
languages predominate” (1910: 120–21). The involvement of children and
the creation of bridges to the communities within the neighborhoods was
not only prompted by expanding the scope of their reading in their “home”
languages but by hosting talks and events as a site for immigrant/library
interactions. Examples include well-attended events such as the theatrical
performance of “’Hamlet’ given under the auspices of the Richmond Hill
House with a cast of Italian boys” in the Hudson Park branch, or a concert
and a recital given by “the people of the neighborhood” (Bulletin 1910:
138–39). Further, the Bulletin notes the fortnightly meetings of the Bohe-
mian club Slavia or the Hungarian American Social Circle (Bulletin 1910:
133–34).13 These activities revealed the immigrant communities being
hosted in the branch libraries. Those were the same branches recording the
highest circulation of foreign-language books in the NYPL annual reports.
A liminal ground for incidental contacts between the Library branches and
the displays of community identity in the immigrant neighborhoods also
provided bridges for individuals’ exit from the “foreign”-ness and their per-
manent entry into the mainstream society by making home in the English
language. Thus, the NYPL Handbook for 1916 notes that “many classes of
foreigners learning English meet regularly” in the Central Building and the
branch libraries in other parts of the Boroughs of Manhattan (1916: 33,
59–61, 62). Combining the conventional reading with the searches to track
the rhetorical incidence of “foreign” revealed four main points of attention
in the NYPL institutional vision—oriented to its collections, teaching “for-
eign” populations, readers, and communities, and building contact zones in
the neighborhoods as bridges to immigrants’ domestication.
Situating libraries as institutional home—Searches for “home” in the

NYPL reports
A global search for “home” in the Bulletin and the Handbook (with 2,616
and 15 instances of the word, respectively) revealed a literal meaning that
situated the word “home” in the names of public homes for those who
are destitute and homeless, needing refuge, signaling replacement homes
in conditions of social displacement, often directly associated with specific
immigrant groups and their poverty, homelessness, temporary home, or
prison “home”—exemplified in the name of the Women’s Prison Society
and Home (Bulletin 1901: 420–21) as a double reference to being secure
for the society to be secure.14
Rhetorically, a more hospitable meaning of “home” occurs in the phrases
such as “one million books lent for home use” through the Circulation Depart-
ment (listed in the NYPL Handbook for 1916, 74) that echoes the monthly
and annual reports in the Bulletin. The “home use” through the Travelling
Libraries program and the heading “Home libraries are booming!” (Bulletin
1904: 505–6) references the vibrant outreach program that delivered books
to private homes for reading and study groups. The addresses and names of
individuals whose homes served as reading rooms are noted in the Bulletin,
alongside books sent to “several camps and vacation homes” presumably
for summer reading (1905: 420). The “home reading” and books for “home
use” meant procurement and proximity “within some reasonable distance of
their residences” (Bulletin 1897: 23, 24).
These NYPL publications include references to home use of de-acces-
sioned books and the annual reports on net losses from open shelves in
the branches. Book theft was diplomatically referred to as “loss from open
shelves,” alongside instructions for the staff “to exercise special vigilance
in the detection of theft and [that] several thieves have been caught and
punished” (Bulletin 1904: 489). This formulation points to the limit of the
Library’s institutional position with regard to the transgressive interactions
of the users taking books home.
Situating immigrants as users of libraries—Searches for “-migrant-,”

“alien-” in the NYPL reports
Despite the NYPL’s totemic status as a welcoming place in New York City
during the period of peak migration, the searches for the word “alien(s)”
revealed no association to the library services (among the 38 instances
retrieved).15 Even more surprisingly, the root “-migrant-” occurs only 89
times, mostly captured in the wording of the names of immigrant societies,
schools, and charities served by the Library’s outreach programs. Despite
the evidence that the NYPL directed activities to immigrants, this discursive
silence in the official records and the rhetorical absence of immigrant users
is in contrast to the circulation reports in which the “foreign” languages
and their “home” users are hyper-visible.
The generic and specific references to immigrants appear only a few times.
For example, the Bulletin for 1916 includes two references to immigrant
users in its report by the Reference Department. One refers to “an immi-
grant who is trying to lay the foundations of his education” and the other
to “educating the immigrant Russian masses” (1916: 213), in which the
same unspecifiable Immigrant User reading in their home language appears
in the context self-fashioning through library use and the library supporting
education programs in NYC.
22 Marija Dalbello
The reports of the Travelling Libraries programs refer to pockets of immi-
grant groups such as in an example of distributing “English history prints for
the immigrants at Ellis Island” (Bulletin 1913: 162). Or, when the Bulletin for
1910 notes the circulation of the worn-out books through the NYPL’s Travel-
ling Libraries program to “Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society, 229
East Broadway” (1913: 164) and the elusive and short-lived program at Ellis
Island immigration station between 1909 and 1921 and the delivery of the
NYPL books to this station in a special book crate (Dalbello 2017). The bib-
liographies listing documents from public charities and hospitals are another
category of incidence in these reports, in which the immigrants were associ-
ated with pauperism, incarceration, correctional institutions, missions, and the
immigrant and emigrant societies.16 Descriptions of cooperative work with
literary and education societies and clubs in the library branches included the
programs for “the protection and education of immigrants” (Bulletin 1913:
183), emphasizing the fragility of the “home state” for immigrants.
In sum, reading of the corpus of the Bulletin and the Handbook in the
period from 1897 through 1921 revealed the rhetorical presences and
silences in the institutional discourse. Captured in these specific official pub-
lications, a general framework for immigrant/library interactions shows the
Library as a social mechanism by which librarians created contact zones for
Americanization through outreach and branch use. The aspirational social
environment within the NYPL was integral to the process by which the
libraries were being fashioned “into friendly, social places—places where
one went for advice and a smiling face as much as for the companionship
of a good book” (Novotny 2003: 346). How these places and settings were
“subject to processes of appropriation as home-like” (Boccagni 2017: 9)
depended on the material culture within the NYPL.
The physicality of libraries as homes and placemaking in libraries

This section focuses on the ideological staging of library as a replace-
ment home through the physicality of library spaces and the representa-
tions of readers’ presence in those spaces recorded in the library reports,
the imagery drawing from archival scrapbooks, social photography, and in
descriptive accounts that revealed the multiplicity of “home” in space, time,
and representations.
Home is located in space, but it is not necessarily a fixed space … it

need not be a large space, but space there must be, for home starts by
bringing some space under control … A home is not only a space, it also
has some structure in time; and because it is for people who are living in
that time and space, it has aesthetic and moral dimensions.
(Mary Douglas 1991: 289; quoted in Boccagni 2017: 5)
In this section, “home, as a discursive resource [that is] potentially instru-

mental to all sorts of political agendas” (Boccagni 2017: xxvii), will be
interpreted from the images and other representation that manifest the ide-
ological staging of the NYPL in the public debate on immigration. The
process of “homing” among the immigrant populations situates the library
as “a source of attachments, desires, needs, and dilemmas,” a “migra-
tion-home nexus,” and a form of meaning-making by which immigrants in
the “here-and-now” were managing a “distance between real and aspired
homes” (Boccagni 2017: xix–xxi). Within the immigrant neighborhoods,
the NYPL provided numerous opportunities for a “homing” experience in
institutional settings by creating aspirational spaces, images, and attach-
ments essential in the process of becoming American, and disguises of
Americanization through cultural objects aimed at a moral uplift of indi-
viduals and immigrants in general.
The ideological staging of the library as home—NYPL institutional

position
The design of the NYPL reading spaces in the official photography of
branches and in the official reports conveys an extraordinary level of detail
about their physicality, reflecting the reformist era librarians’ concrete and
factualist presentation. For example, the Bulletin for 1909 details that the
Hudson Park building was painted throughout, that the Jackson Square
branch installed a new heating plant, and that the Aguilar branch installed
extensive new shelving, remodeling the children’s rooms (1909: 141). The
Bulletin reports focused in part on buildings, with detailed floor plans and
elevations, blueprints marking furniture arrangements in reading rooms,
with functionalist explanations of their design and detailed description of
artwork, and decorations alongside statistical circulation reports.
The sensorial spaces that emerge from the extensive documentation were
the reading rooms on rooftops, first introduced in summer 1905 in the Riv-
ington Street branch. Described in the Bulletin for 1910, a roof reading
room was “forty feet square [and] it proved so popular, 7483 readers using
it during the summer of 1905, that similar accommodations were called
for in four other buildings located in crowded districts” (1910: 102–3).17
One of them was in the Seward Park branch on East Broadway, the suc-
cessor of the Aguilar Free Library, that was newly opened in late 1909
through a Carnegie gift (1910: 103) and was situated in a radical immigrant
working-class neighborhood. A series of images depicting the Seward Park
branch convey the sensory dimensions of these spaces. The Handbook for
1916 includes images of the branch exterior, floor plans including one for
the rooftop open-air reading room with 16 desks and awning drawn in as
well as a photograph, a reading space where we can observe the readers
(1916: 68–70). The photograph titled, “Seward Park Roof reading room”
shows a group of absorbed readers seated at one table—a young woman or
a girl, a man, and two boys and another group at the adjacent table (Figure
1.1). The awning frames this scene and captures the New York sfumato
skyline.
24 Marija Dalbello
Figure 1.1 “Seward Park Roof reading room” (ca. 1910b).

Source: From The New York Public Library.
This image has a luxuriously urban feel, conveying spaciousness and
comfort through tables, chairs, reading material, a boxwood fence, and
a balustrade and awning framing the view. The readers’ relaxed postures,
likely posed, convey representability.
Other images are technical and documentary. For example, “Seward Park
Children in Library” (1910a) (Figure 1.2) captures the children’s circulation
desk and the work process in the branch.
From the vantage point the viewer shares with the photographer, the
women librarians seated on Thonet chairs are turned away from the cam-
era and facing a crowd of children, the circulation desk between them. The
slightly claustrophobic feeling is conveyed by the structured, piled up card
catalogs placed under the circulation desk, contrasted to an amorphous
crowd of children facing the librarians and a group of men seated in the
faraway back of the room whose role as parents or guards is unclear. The aes-
thetics and materiality of this space recalls the material culture of a well-func-
tioning household in the “organization of the work process” (the functional
parts of the library like the circulation desk and the filing cabinets) together
with the “creation of the intimate surroundings” through ornamental pieces
and the middle-class atmosphere and dwelling in which the idea of comfort
is also conveyed through the conventional library tables, “glassed-in book-
cases” (Giedion [1949] 2013: 519–20, 297–98, 323–24). In this atmosphere,
Figure 1.2 “Seward Park Children in library” (ca. 1910a).

the information management processes indicated by the efficiency of library

furniture correspond to the period iconography of home management (ibid.:
522–23). In the portrayal of women and children in this and other images,
libraries are presented as women’s domains while depicting the work process.
The Bulletin for 1910 gives information about the procurement of
objects: “through the kindness of Mr. Dodge and other friends we have
been able to add to the attractiveness of the branches by the purchase of
pictures, plaster casts, plants, etc.” (1910: 103). The decoration of the chil-
dren’s rooms is detailed in another account, listing murals with motives
from Howard Pyle’s Robin Hood, the Arabian Nights, Brothers Grimm and
Hans Andersen’s fairy tales illustrated by Helen Stratton in Seward Park
and Tompkins branches and that “several German lithographs and pictures
of a similar kind were purchased for circulation among the branches as tem-
porary exhibits”; that “[p]lants and other decorations have been received
by a considerable number of libraries … that attracted much attention and
favorable comment from children and grown people” (1910: 120). The spa-
tial iconography reflects the intimacy of the parlor room in a bourgeois
home.18 These pacifying spaces and settings reveal an institutional style and
the implementation of the hygienic practices dictated by modern science
that included cleanliness and sanitation to fight illness and disease.
26 Marija Dalbello
Figure 1.3 “Seward Park Students pictured at depleted American History shelf” (ca. 1910).
Figure 1.3 documents an interaction in the library branch that is slightly

discomforting, making the visual “obtuse” and hard to comprehend (Oxman
2010: 71). It is captioned, “Seward Park students pictured at depleted Amer-
ican History shelf” (1910). Why photograph an empty shelf? The narrative
construction explaining this “depleted American History shelf” could point
to an eager readership or draw attention to the shortcomings of the library
collection. The visual immediacy of the image captures a moment of insti-
tutional consternation—with a helpless librarian standing in front of the
empty shelves facing inquiring children. This photograph conveys tensions
between aspiration and reality—the excited immigrant readers against the
“depleted” and lackluster performance of institutional virtue.
Domesticated immigrant readers domesticating the library: Friction

between the library home and the tenement home
The materiality of books passing into the immigrants’ homes and books
as “nomadic” objects passing thresholds in the interactions of immigrants
and library surface in the larger discourse of librarianship directed at
immigrants. The librarians’ testimonials about the immigrant reading are
enmeshed with the rhetoric of dearth and dirt,
[O]ur books are read to pieces … we are altruists playing Cinderella

on short rations. But the joy I get doing something with nothing! Some
weeks I get nothing out of it but mud. It depends on the weather. Once in
a while I have the pleasure of scrubbing up some dear Italian boy, before
I allow him to take a book in his hand. That is where the personal touch
comes in! And so it goes! The uncouth new-comers, soon disciplined!
The zeal in reading, the growing appreciation of our country among her
members—Poles, Italians, Armenians! The sudden success that perforce
led for a while to taking all English books out of the Polish library, until
a fair supply could be secured, and the clamor stopped.
(Carr 1916: 152)
These librarians saw themselves as “altruists playing Cinderella on short

rations.” The cost of their success in drawing readers to the library were the
“books read to pieces,” turned into “mud” by the soiled readers’ hands. In
her report on “library work among foreigners,” Josepha Kudlicka describes
a cleansing ritual when children,
“some of [whom] never saw [emphasis in the original] picture books,

many are ragged and dirty, but we take them to a basin in the corner
of the room, where they wash their hands and faces and then with
eager eyes look at the books or come to the desk to sign their names
for library cards” or a librarian giving “a cake of soap” to a child to
take home.
(1910: 375, 376)
The miasmic presence of immigrants’ reading in the library is extended to

the librarians’ sensorium when visiting the “foreign” quarters in the New
York City East Side, the bakeries, soda shops, and newspaper offices selling
books and newspapers, as reflected in this quote by a librarian from Passaic
(New Jersey) public library: “In buying foreign books, if you do not get the
small-pox or the pink-eye, you will accumulate enough experiences to fill a
three volume novel” (Campbell 1904: 67).
The contiguity between the library home and the tenement home is tied
to an interplay of purity and dirt. Thus, the NYPL as a place of belonging
and Americanization crystallizes tensions within reformist discourses and
surfaces the surprising domestication of the Library as the immigrants’ lived
home. The “legitimate” uses of the book and the forms of reading (Chartier
1992: 51) depended on disciplining the hands of pragmatic readers who
introduced the grime and dirt of their tenement home through their reading.
The reading space was exposed as an illusion through the “real space” of
their lived lives (Foucault 1986: 27). The tactility of reading and reading at
home was an un-reflected activity that made visible the reality of laborers’
homes that could not be kept out of the library. The books became reflec-
tive surfaces through the act of touch and reading, the turning of the pages
recalling the repetitive action of some industrial process. Leafing through
books produced a friction with paper and transferred to it an “honorable,”
working-class dirt. The tenement homes, books, and libraries became con-
tiguous spaces by “how they are touched by each other and envelop each
28 Marija Dalbello
other” and their “likeness” became “an effect of the proximity of shared
residence” (Ahmed 2007: 155). Relocating the conditions of the laborers’
home/workspace to the library envelops the familiar and familial places.
An inside-out perspective of the library in the city: An exposé of the

reality of aspirations
How working-class readers made the Library a home in the City was visible
through the consequences of immigrants’ real and symbolic “hunger for books”
and the transgressive forms of reading books “to pieces” and the transmission
of dirt. This reality clashed with the utopian projections of a well-stocked
library with clean books articulated in the conformist and idealized visions
of services to immigrants. An undercover journalist Selma Robinson, posing
as a library assistant in the Seward Park branch in 1922, published an exposé
with a headline, “Book Shortage at Libraries Hinders Youth, People Unable to
Obtain Prescribed Volumes for Home Reading, Reporter for Tribune Discov-
ers, Even Classics are Missing, Reduced Grants Result in a Decrease in Titles:
Aliens Get Little Help” (Robinson 1922). Her ethnographic-style descriptions
question the public-facing images of the Library and remind us that “space
is a practiced place” and grounds where meaning is lived (de Certeau 1984:
117). Her investigative report included an image showing children returning
library books titled, “Typical scene of congestion in branch library: evidence
of need for relief from crowded conditions” (Robinson 1922). “And that is
how I found Seward Park library” depicts a grim physicality of reading, the
discomforting, decaying, decrepit, unhygienic and disfigured books, anxious
users and staff, and understaffed libraries. The Library’s cooperation with the
City’s schools, celebrated in the annual reports and the NYPL circulation sta-
tistics, is shown not to be able to supply books nor influence “the children
through their teachers on the proper care of books”:
But there are no books to take their place, and all the shelves are full
of grayed, tattered volumes. The pages are frayed along the edges, fat-
stained and fish-incrusted, for the East Side child eats while he reads.
They have been handled so many times by sweating little fingers that
sometimes the print is obliterated. The dirt on the bindings is thick
enough to scratch away with a pin. I couldn’t rub my hands clean of
the grimy feeling that persisted even after soap and water. … The little
breeze stirred up by turning the leaves seemed polluted, and I held my
breath while I examined the books.
(Robinson 1922)
The physicality of books in the children’s department reflected the living

conditions of their readers, especially the East Side immigrant readers; their
inability to read but in “Russian and Yiddish such writers as Gorky, Tolstoy
and Checkhov”; or, the scarcity of relevant literature for their American-
ization. There was nothing beyond elementary civics and a few books of
the frontier days” and those “who must qualify for naturalization papers,
read the simple sentences of Goldberg’s English for coming citizens” and
no books to “introduce them to real American life” (ibid.). Scarcity and
dirt are captured in the heading, “Foreign Born Hunger for Romance,” that
includes this exchange between herself and an immigrant reader:
The foreign books pass in and out of the library in rapid circulation.
Their readers are hungry for tales that supply the romance which cut-
ting cloth and sewing seams rob from life. One long-bearded Jew who
just spent the evening on a settee near the window with a thin book on
his lap asked me: “Why is always the same books?” He nodded sympa-
thetically while I explained that the library had no funds for new titles,
and I nodded sympathetically while he explained that he had read every
one of the books in the meager collection. He pointed to the book he
had been reading. Each of the pages was swollen to twice its original
size by filth and much handling. “Dirty, no?” he said.
(ibid.)
She portrays the Seward Park branch dwindling book stocks: where “more
than half the books should have been cast into the rubbish heap”; favored
books “never on the shelves for more than ten minutes at a time” although
“even a soiled book is better than none at all” (ibid.). This vignette points
to the ironies of the reformist discourse when an actual library assistant
confided her idea of Utopia to Robinson: “‘It is the place,’ she said, ‘where
there are enough copies of Mark Twain, Dickens, O. Henry and Stevenson
for those who want them; nice clean books’” (ibid.). The NYPL commu-
nity house programs lauded in the institutional reports are naturalistically
described in the “Lecture Room in Basement,”
One of the functions of the library is to serve as a community house,

where clubs may meet and lectures be given. I expected to see a good
sized clubroom, for I had heard of the several mothers and children’s
clubs of Seward Park. I found what was once a cellar store room for old
books, a dingy room, with tiny windows placed next to the ceiling, and
water pipes writhing around the walls. One hundred and seventy-five
persons are crowded into this room to hear Friday night lecture. There
isn’t enough money for a new coat of paint.
(ibid.)
And further,
That is how I found Seward Park Library. That is how I would find every
library in the city, I was assured, although the librarians hastened to say that
they were not complaining. The library system is like an orphan who has been
starved by his guardians. He is afraid to ask for more for fear of getting less.
(ibid.)
30 Marija Dalbello
The Library serving as a “community house” in New York City’s Lower East
Side at the start of the second decade of the twentieth century was an extension
of the immigrants’ dwellings/workplaces—where work and life overlapped
and came into friction with each other—clashing aspiration and institutional
realities. The physicality of poverty is relocated to the Library, an “orphan”
starved by its “guardian” (i.e., the City). Just like the slum-like tenements, a
social condition, and lived life, the dirt and discomfort of the readers were
transmitted to the books and the physicality of spaces that extended their
home into the library spaces. (Such conditions of immigrants’ work and life in
the tenements were authentically conveyed by the social photographers Lewis
Wickes Hine (Freedman and Hine 1998) and Jacob Riis ([1890] 2016).19
Reading the official NYPL publications and photography “along” and
“against” the grain pointed to the material practices in the immigrants’
interactions with the library. The NYPL as an institution “where regulated
social routines and performances take place” defined the cultural function
and “distinction” through which the cognoscenti differentiated themselves
from the masses” and created a “contradictory dynamics” (Bennett 1995:
11). They succeeded in circulating books but not domesticating the immi-
grants. Ironically, the immigrants domesticated the library.
Immigrants making a shadow home in the library

Contrary topological notions of home in libraries and the relative place-
less-ness and homeless-ness of immigrants in society, with the NYPL as
a contact zone, emerge in immigrant autobiographies. Anzia Yezierska, a
reader in the Seward Park branch,
portrayed the effect of a branch library on a working-class Russian

girl who falls in love with a young American sociologist [a reference to
John Dewey] intent on Americanizing her: ‘What a stillness full from
thinking! So beautiful, it comes on me like music.’ The contrast between
herself and the ‘book-ladies … so quiet like the things,’ their hands so
well kept and clothes so simple, reveals the insurmountable distance
separating her from the sociologist.
(Dain 1972: 290)
Yezierska’s stories Hungry Hearts (1920) depict the “liminal spaces of New
York’s Lower East Side tenements – with their dark interiors and crowded
exteriors, with their stores, chaotic and noisy streets” amid which the library
appears as “a transition point for the protagonists on their paths into Amer-
ican life” with strategic imagery of books, reading, and literacy as an actant
in the crucial scenes and contrasts in the process of Americanization and the
replacement identities they were creating (Dalbello 2018: 79). The protagonist
of Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) frequents the library
of the East Side branch of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, an idealized
image of the library as a place for integration across the social classes:
It was a sort of university settlement in which educated men and women
from up-town acted as ‘workers.’ The advice these would give me as to
my reading, their kindly manner, their native English, and last but not
least, the flattering way in which they would speak of my intellectual
aspirations, led me to spend many an hour in the place. The great thing
was to hear these American-born people speak their native tongue and
to have them hear me speak it.
(Dain 1972: 290)
The old Aguilar Library branch in Italian Harlem, with only a few books in
a rented storefront,
was a ‘fascinating and wonderful place’ for the boys and girls who
had never owned books. Leonard Covello, later the principal of the
nearby Benjamin Franklin High School, recollected his daily visits to
the library, his ‘life in the wonder-world of books.’ The adolescent Louis
Adamic, only three years in this country, found in the Yorkville Branch
‘real’ books like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906); its impression on
the future writer was not quite what the Americanizers had in mind.
(Dain 1972: 290)
Thus, the “services to the foreign born” (ibid.: 288) combining literacy and
citizenship were connected to the powerful founding myth and stories of
individual immigrants being the conscious subjects engaged in self-fash-
ioning aimed at Americanization that is integral to social re-fashioning and
moving up and out of the tenements home to dwell in society.
Conclusion
The historians of the Progressive era in America pointed to the conflicting
goals of the reformist ideology that confounded the economic interests of
the nation with the requirement of a certain type of integrative support for
immigrant laborers. In this case, the domestication and the Americaniza-
tion of immigrants was facilitated by the Library institution and the soft
power of genteel, middle-class librarians. The policy-related public debates
of ideological nature were then and remain at the core of effort of sanitiz-
ing the library history of this era and disguising their political agenda of
conformism and a site for pacifying the working class (Garrison 1979). The
euphoric, self-validating, and self-congratulatory idealism of the reformers
was successful in that the immigrants used the services rendered and desired
them, yet there are silences around reciprocity by which the Library would
maintain the services and advocate for them. Though repudiated by the
“revisionist” historians (Harris 1973; Garrison 1979; Wiegand 1989) and
unmasked in the silences of the idealistic framing of the institution in the
official record (Trouillot [1995] 2015), the celebrated librarians’ activities
presented a model of an appropriative history in which librarians appear
32 Marija Dalbello
in a heroic role. In the actual story of building services for immigrants,
the NYPL offered an “existential ground” for building a relational identity
in which identity is materialized (Malpas 2006b: 205; Deleuze 1995) by
“building” a place for the immigrants, “a letting dwell” (Malpas 2006a:
381) and conveying “a sense of … identity as shaped in relation to those
places—to a sense of ‘belonging to’ those places” (Malpas 2006b: 198–99).
The affects and senses enter the discussion of the librarians who defined
their idea of the library through “warm, helpful kindness that is reaching
out and also helping the foreigners” (Kudlicka 1910: 375) while echoing
the surfaces of dirt and pollution that recorded, in the space of soiled books
and reading, a friction between immigrant readers and the public libraries.
The library spaces were an extension of the social conditions in the tene-
ments, characterized by their neglect and the lack of funds in the political
economy of the immigrant/library interactions.
Acknowledgment
The author thanks Anselm Spoerri for his feedback on drafts of this paper.
Notes
1 Published in The New York Times Saturday Review, January 31, 1902.
2 “Immigrant Services,” https://www.nypl.org/help/community-outreach/
immigrant-services.
3 World Languages Collections (WLC) in public libraries are often limited to lan-
guage instruction manuals. The languages are listed on the website. For example,
Newark Public Library claims Spanish and Portuguese, the Boston Public Library
lists 17, and The Westchester Library system claims 71 languages. The NYPL
features a World Languages blog about services in Spanish, French, Chinese
and Russian, portals prepared by outreach librarians, the World Languages
Electronic Resources and “‘Say What?’ Look at What the Library Has in Your
Language” translation service for search results from English to other languages,
access to online resources for use in the classroom.
4 “Resources for Immigrants in NYC,” https://www.nypl.org/blog/2019/07/15/
resources-immigrants-nyc.
5 The New York Free Circulating Library was “formed in 1878 for a church
sponsored sewing class [and expanded to] eleven branches by 1899” (The New
York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York, NY, Free
Circulating Libraries Records, 1880–1905, MssArc RG4 4858).
6 Ibid.
7 The New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York,
NY, Arthur Elmore Bostwick Records, 1901–1909, MssArc 5559.
8 The searches were performed using Hathi Trust and Internet Archive document
tools and searching across the PDF collections of the Bulletin (1897–1920) and
the Handbook for 1900, 1916, 1921.
9 The “foreign” title circulation was at 345,260 (of overall 7,013,649 circulated in
the 33 branches). Travelling Libraries program reported the circulation of 1,853
foreign titles (of overall 1,028,550).
10 The report states that 96 donors presented 706 books, 60 newspapers, and 13
periodicals for the collection that year.
11 This list included 4,500 broadsides.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
into the giant republic. So the old captain finished such a task as
“God, after His manner, assigns to His Englishmen.”
XXXVI
A. D. 1670
THE BUCCANEERS
IT is only a couple of centuries since Spain was the greatest nation

on earth, with the Atlantic for her duck pond, the American
continents for her back yard, and a notice up to warn away the
English, “No dogs admitted.”
England was a little power then, Charles II had to come running
when the French king whistled, and we were so weak that the Dutch
burned our fleet in London River. Every year a Spanish fleet came
from the West Indies to Cadiz, laden deep with gold, silver, gems,
spices and all sorts of precious merchandise.
Much as our sailors hated to see all that treasure wasted on
Spaniards, England had to keep the peace with Spain, because
Charles II had his crown jewels in pawn and no money for such
luxuries as war. The Spanish envoy would come to him making
doleful lamentations about our naughty sailors, who, in the far Indies,
had insolently stolen a galleon or sacked a town. Charles, with his
mouth watering at such a tale of loot, would be inexpressibly
shocked. The “lewd French” must have done this, or the “pernicious
Dutch,” but not our woolly lambs—our innocent mariners.
The buccaneers of the West Indies were of many nations
besides the British, and they were not quite pirates. For instance,
they would scorn to seize a good Protestant shipload of salt fish, but
always attacked the papist who flaunted golden galleons before the
nose of the poor. They were serious-minded Protestants with strong
views on doctrine, and only made their pious excursions to seize the
goods of the unrighteous. Their opinions were so sound on all really
important points of dogmatic theology that they could allow
themselves a little indulgence in mere rape, sacrilege, arson, robbery
and murder, or fry Spaniards in olive oil for concealing the cash box.
Then, enriched by such pious exercises, they devoutly spent the
whole of their savings on staying drunk for a month.
The first buccaneers sallied out in a small boat and captured a
war-ship. From such small beginnings arose a pirate fleet, which,
under various leaders, French, Dutch, Portuguese, became a
scourge to the Spanish empire overseas. When they had wiped out
Spain’s merchant shipping and were short of plunder, they attacked
fortified cities, held them to ransom, and burned them for fun, then in
chase of the fugitive citizens, put whole colonies to an end by sword
and fire.
Naturally only the choicest scoundrels rose to captaincies, and
the worst of the lot became admiral. It should thrill the souls of all
Welshmen to learn that Henry Morgan gained that bad eminence. He
had risen to the command of five hundred cutthroats when he
pounced down on Maracaibo Bay in Venezuela. At the entrance
stood Fort San Carlos, the place which has lately resisted the attack
of a German squadron. Morgan was made of sterner stuff than these
Germans, for when the garrison saw him coming, they took to the
woods, leaving behind them a lighted fuse at the door of the
magazine. Captain Morgan grabbed that fuse himself in time to save
his men from a disagreeable hereafter.
Beyond its narrow entrance at Fort San Carlos, the inlet widens
to an inland sea, surrounded in those days by Spanish settlements,
with the two cities of Gibraltar and Maracaibo. Morgan sacked these
towns and chased their flying inhabitants into the mountains. His
prisoners, even women and children, were tortured on the rack until
they revealed all that they knew of hidden money, and some were
burned by inches, starved to death, or crucified.
These pleasures had been continued for five weeks, when a
squadron of three heavy war-ships arrived from Spain, and blocked
the pirates’ only line of retreat to the sea at Fort San Carlos. Morgan
prepared a fire ship, with which he grappled and burned the Spanish
admiral. The second ship was wrecked, the third captured by the
pirates, and the sailors of the whole squadron were butchered while
they drowned. Still Fort San Carlos, now bristling with new guns, had
to be dealt with before the pirates could make their escape to the
sea. Morgan pretended to attack from the land, so that all the guns
were shifted to that side of the fort ready to wipe out his forces. This
being done, he got his men on board, and sailed through the channel
in perfect safety.
Sir Henry Morgan

And yet attacks upon such places as Maracaibo were mere
trifling, for the Spaniards held all the wealth of their golden Indies at
Panama. This gorgeous city was on the Pacific Ocean, and to reach
it, one must cross the Isthmus of Darien by the route in later times of
the Panama railway and the Panama Canal, through the most
unwholesome swamps, where to sleep at night in the open was
almost sure death from fever. Moreover, the landing place at
Chagres was covered by a strong fortress, the route was swarming
with Spanish troops and wild savages in their pay, and their
destination was a walled city esteemed impregnable.
By way of preparing for his raid, Morgan sent four hundred men
who stormed the castle of Chagres, compelling the wretched
garrison to jump off a cliff to destruction. The English flag shone from
the citadel when Morgan’s fleet arrived. The captain landed one
thousand two hundred men and set off up the Chagres River with
five boats loaded with artillery, thirty-two canoes and no food. This
was a mistake, because the Spaniards had cleared the whole
isthmus, driving off the cattle, rooting out the crops, carting away the
grain, burning every roof, and leaving nothing for the pirates to live
on except the microbes of fever. As the pirates advanced they
retreated, luring them on day by day into the heart of the wilderness.
The pirates broiled and ate their sea boots, their bandoleers, and
certain leather bags. The river being foul with fallen timber, they took
to marching. On the sixth day they found a barn full of maize and ate
it up, but only on the ninth day had they a decent meal, when,
sweating, gasping and swearing, they pounced upon a herd of asses
and cows, and fell to roasting flesh on the points of their swords.
On the tenth day they debouched upon a plain before the City of
Panama, where the governor awaited with his troops. There were
two squadrons of cavalry and four regiments of foot, besides guns,
and the pirates heartily wished themselves at home with their
mothers. Happily the Spanish governor was too sly, for he had
prepared a herd of wild bulls with Indian herders to drive into the
pirate ranks, which bulls, in sheer stupidity, rushed his own
battalions. Such bulls as tried to fly through the pirate lines were
readily shot down, but the rest brought dire confusion. Then began a
fierce battle, in which the Spaniards lost six hundred men before
they bolted. Afterward through a fearful storm of fire from great
artillery, the pirates stormed the city and took possession.
Of course, by this time, the rich galleons had made away to sea
with their treasure, and the citizens had carried off everything worth
moving, to the woods. Moreover, the pirates were hasty in burning
the town, so that the treasures which had been buried in wells or
cellars were lost beyond all finding. During four weeks, this splendid
capital of the Indies burned, while the people hid in the woods; and
the pirates tortured everybody they could lay hands on with fiendish
cruelty. Morgan himself, caught a beautiful lady and threw her into a
cellar full of filth because she would not love him. Even in their
retreat to the Atlantic, the pirates carried off six hundred prisoners,
who rent the air with their lamentations, and were not even fed until
their ransoms arrived.
Before reaching Chagres, Morgan had every pirate stripped to
make sure that all loot was fairly divided. The common pirates were
bitterly offended at the dividend of only two hundred pieces of eight
per man, but Morgan stole the bulk of the plunder for himself, and
returned a millionaire to Jamaica.
Charles II knighted him and made him governor of Jamaica as a
reward for robbing the Spaniards. Afterwards his majesty changed
his mind, and Morgan died a prisoner in the tower of London as a
punishment for the very crime which had been rewarded with a title
and a vice-royalty.
XXXVII
A. D. 1682
THE VOYAGEURS
THIS chapter must begin with a very queer tale of rivers as

adventurers exploring for new channels.
Millions of years ago the inland seas—Superior, Michigan and
Huron—had their overflow down the Ottawa Valley, reaching the
Saint Lawrence at the Island of Montreal.
But, when the glaciers of the great ice age blocked the Ottawa
Valley, the three seas had to find another outlet, so they made a
channel through the Chicago River, down the Des Plaines, and the
Illinois, into the Mississippi.
And when the glaciers made, across that channel, an
embankment which is now the town site of Chicago, the three seas
had to explore for a new outlet. So they filled the basin of Lake Erie,
and poured over the edge of Queenstown Heights into Lake Ontario.
The Iroquois called that fall the “Thunder of Waters,” which in their
language is Niagara.
All the vast region which was flooded by the ice-field of the great
ice age became a forest, and every river turned by the ice out of its
ancient channel became a string of lakes and waterfalls. This
beautiful wilderness was the scene of tremendous adventures,
where the red Indians fought the white men, and the English fought
the French, and the Americans fought the Canadians, until the
continent was cut into equal halves, and there was peace.
Now let us see what manner of men were the Indians. At the
summit of that age of glory—the sixteenth century—the world was
ruled by the despot Akbar the Magnificent at Delhi, the despot Ivan
the Terrible at Moscow, the despot Phillip II at Madrid, and a little
lady despot, Elizabeth of the sea.
Yet at that time the people in the Saint Lawrence Valley, the
Mohawks, Oneidas, Senecas, Cayugas and, in the middle, the
Onondagas, were free republics with female suffrage and women as
members of parliament. Moreover the president of the Onondagas,
Hiawatha, formed these five nations into the federal republic of the
Iroquois, and they admitted the Tuscaroras into that United States
which was created to put an end to war. In the art of government we
have not yet caught up with the Iroquois.
They were farmers, with rich fisheries, had comfortable houses,
and fortified towns. In color they were like outdoor Spaniards, a tall,
very handsome race, and every bit as able as the whites. Given
horses, hard metals for their tools, and some channel or mountain
range to keep off savage raiders, and they might well have become
more civilized than the French, with fleets to attack old Europe, and
missionaries to teach us their religion.
Their first visitor from Europe was Jacques Cartier and they gave
him a hearty welcome at Quebec. When his men were dying of
scurvy an Indian doctor cured them. But to show his gratitude Cartier
kidnaped the five principal chiefs, and ever after that, with very brief
intervals, the French had reason to fear the Iroquois. Like many
another Indian nation, driven away from its farms and fisheries, the
six nation republic lapsed to savagery, lived by hunting and robbery,
ravaged the white men’s settlements and the neighbor tribes for
food, outraged and scalped the dead, burned or even ate their
prisoners.
The French colonies were rather over-governed. There was too
much parson and a great deal too much squire to suit the average
peasant, so all the best of the men took to the fur trade. They wore
the Indian dress of long fringed deerskin, coon cap, embroidered
moccasins, and a French sash like a rainbow. They lived like
Indians, married among the tribes, fought in their wars; lawless, gay,
gallant, fierce adventurers, the voyageurs of the rivers, the runners
of the woods.
With them went monks into the wilderness, heroic, saintly Jesuits
and Franciscans, and some of the quaintest rogues in holy orders.
And there were gentlemen, reckless explorers, seeking a way to
China. Of this breed came La Salle, whose folk were merchant-
princes at Rouen, and himself pupil and enemy of the Jesuits. At the
time of the plague and burning of London he founded a little
settlement on the island of Mount Royal, just by the head of the
Rapids. His dream was the opening of trade with China by way of
the western rivers, so the colonists, chaffing him, gave the name La
Chine to his settlement and the rapids. To-day the railway trains
come swirling by, with loads of tea from China to ship from Montreal,
but not to France.
During La Salle’s first five years in the wilderness he discovered
the Ohio and the Illinois, two of the head waters of the Mississippi.
The Indians told him of that big river, supposed to be the way to the
Pacific. A year later the trader Joliet, and the Jesuit Saint Marquette
descended the Mississippi as far as the Arkansas. So La Salle
dreamed of a French empire in the west, shutting the English
between the Appalachians and the Atlantic, with a base at the mouth
of the Mississippi for raiding the Spanish Indies, and a trade route
across the western sea to China. All this he told to Count Frontenac,
the new governor general, a man of business who saw the worth of
the adventure. Frontenac sent La Salle to talk peace with the
Iroquois, while he himself founded Fort Frontenac at the outlet of
Lake Ontario. From here he cut the trade routes of the west, so that
no furs would ever reach the French traders of Montreal or the
English of New York. The governor had not come to Canada for his
health.
La Salle was penniless, but his mind went far beyond this petty
trading; he charmed away the dangers from hostile tribes; his heroic
record won him help from France. Within a year he began his
adventure of the Mississippi by buying out Fort Frontenac as his
base camp. Here he built a ship, and though she was wrecked he
saved stores enough to cross the Niagara heights, and build a
second vessel on Lake Erie. With the Griffin he came to the meeting
place of the three upper seas—Machilli-Mackinac—the Jesuit
headquarters. Being a good-natured man bearing no malice, it was
with a certain pomp of drums, flags and guns that he saluted the fort,
quite forgetting that he came as a trespasser into the Jesuit mission.
A Jesuit in those days was a person with a halo at one end and a tail
at the other, a saint with modest black draperies to hide cloven
hoofs, who would fast all the week, and poison a guest on Saturday,
who sought the glory of martyrdom not always for the faith, but
sometimes to serve a devilish wicked political secret society. Leaving
the Jesuit mission an enemy in his rear, La Salle built a fort at the
southern end of Lake Michigan, sent off his ship for supplies, and
entered the unknown wilderness. As winter closed down he came
with thirty-three men in eight birchbark canoes to the Illinois nation
on the river Illinois.
Meanwhile the Jesuits sent Indian messengers to raise the
Illinois tribes for war against La Salle, to kill him by poison, and to
persuade his men to desert. La Salle put a rising of the Illinois to
shame, ate three dishes of poison without impairing his very sound
digestion, and made his men too busy for revolt; building Fort
Brokenheart, and a third ship for the voyage down the Mississippi to
the Spanish Indies.
Then came the second storm of trouble, news that his relief ship
from France was cast away, his fort at Frontenac was seized for
debt, and his supply vessel on the upper lakes was lost. He must go
to Canada.
The third storm was still to come, the revenge of the English for
the cutting of their fur trade at Fort Frontenac. They armed five
hundred Iroquois to massacre the Illinois who had befriended him in
the wilderness.
Robert Cavalier de la Salle
At Fort Brokenheart La Salle had a valiant priest named

Hennepin, a disloyal rogue and a quite notable liar. With two
voyageurs Pere Hennepin was sent to explore the river down to the
Mississippi, and there the three Frenchmen were captured by the
Sioux. Their captors took them by canoe up the Mississippi to the
Falls of Saint Anthony, so named by Hennepin. Thence they were
driven afoot to the winter villages of the tribe. The poor unholy father
being slow afoot, they mended his pace by setting the prairie afire
behind him. Likewise they anointed him with wildcat fat to give him
the agility of that animal. Still he was never popular, and in the end
the three wanderers were turned loose. Many were their vagabond
adventures before they met the explorer Greysolon Du Luth, who
took them back with him to Canada. They left La Salle to his fate.
Meanwhile La Salle set out from Fort Brokenheart in March,
attended by a Mohegan hunter who loved him, and by four gallant
Frenchmen. Their journey was a miracle of courage across the
unexplored woods to Lake Erie, and on to Frontenac. There La Salle
heard that the moment his back was turned his garrison had looted
and burned Fort Brokenheart; but he caught these deserters as they
attempted to pass Fort Frontenac, and left them there in irons.
Every man has power to make of his mind an empire or a desert.
At this time Louis the Great was master of Europe, La Salle a broken
adventurer, but it was the king’s mind which was a desert, compared
with the imperial brain of this haughty, silent, manful pioneer. The
creditors forgot that he owed them money, the governor caught fire
from his enthusiasm, and La Salle went back equipped for his
gigantic venture in the west.
The officer he had left in charge at Fort Brokenheart was an
Italian gentleman by the name of Tonty, son of the man who invented
the tontine life insurance. He was a veteran soldier whose left hand,
blown off, had been replaced with an iron fist, which the Indians
found to be strong medicine. One clout on the head sufficed for the
fiercest warrior. When his garrison sacked the fort and bolted, he had
two fighting men left, and a brace of priests. They all sought refuge
in the camp of the Illinois.
Presently this pack of curs had news that La Salle was leading
an army of Iroquois to their destruction, so instead of preparing for
defense they proposed to murder Tonty and his Frenchmen, until the
magic of his iron fist quite altered their point of view. Sure enough
the Iroquois arrived in force, and the cur pack, three times as strong,
went out to fight. Then through the midst of the battle Tonty walked
into the enemy’s lines. He ordered the Iroquois to go home and
behave themselves, and told such fairy tales about the strength of
his curs that these ferocious warriors were frightened. Back walked
Tonty to find his cur pack on their knees in tears of gratitude. Again
he went to the Iroquois, this time with stiff terms if they wanted
peace, but an Illinois envoy gave his game away, with such
extravagant bribes and pleas for mercy that the Iroquois laughed at
Tonty. They burned the Illinois town, dug up their graveyard, chased
the flying nation, butchered the abandoned women and children, and
hunted the cur pack across the Mississippi. Tonty and his
Frenchmen made their way to their nearest friends, the
Pottawattomies, to await La Salle’s return.
And La Salle returned. He found the Illinois town in ashes,
littered with human bones. He found an island of the river where
women and children by hundreds had been outraged, tortured and
burned. His fort was a weed-grown ruin. In all the length of the valley
there was no vestige of human life, or any clue as to the fate of Tonty
and his men. For the third time La Salle made that immense journey
to the settlements, wrung blood from stones to equip an expedition,
and coming to Lake Michigan rallied the whole of the native tribes in
one strong league, a red Indian colony with himself as chief, for
defense from the Iroquois. The scattered Illinois returned to their
abandoned homes, tribes came from far and wide to join the colony
and in the midst, upon Starved Rock, La Salle built Fort Saint Louis
as their stronghold. When Tonty joined him, for once this iron man
showed he had a heart.
So, after all, La Salle led an expedition down the whole length of
the Mississippi. He won the friendship of every tribe he met, bound
them to French allegiance, and at the end erected the standard of
France on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. “In the name of the most
high, mighty, invincible and victorious Prince, Louis the Great, by the
Grace of God, King of France and of Navarre,” on the nineteenth of
April, 1682. La Salle annexed the valley of the Mississippi from the
Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians, from the lakes to the gulf, and
named that empire Louisiana.
As to the fate of this great explorer, murdered in the wilderness
by followers he disdained to treat as comrades, “his enemies were
more in earnest than his friends.”
XXXVIII
A. D. 1741
THE EXPLORERS
FROM the time of Henry VII of England down to the present day, the
nations of Europe have been busy with one enormous adventure,
the search for the best trade route to India and the China seas. For
four whole centuries this quest for a trade route has been the main
current of the history of the world. Look what the nations have done
in that long fight for trade.
Portugal found the sea route by Magellan’s Strait, and occupied
Brazil; the Cape route, and colonized the coasts of Africa. She built
an empire.
Spain mistook the West Indies for the real Indies, and the red
men for the real Indians, found the Panama route, and occupied the
new world from Cape Horn up to the southern edge of Alaska. She
built an empire.
France, in the search of a route across North America, occupied
Canada and the Mississippi Valley. She built an empire. That lost,
she attempted under Napoleon to occupy Egypt, Palestine and the
whole overland road to India. That failing, she has dug the Suez
Canal and attempted the Panama, both sea routes to the Indies.
Holland, searching for a route across North America, found
Hudson’s Bay and occupied Hudson River (New York). On the South
Sea route she built her rich empire in the East Indian Islands.
Britain, searching eastward first, opened up Russia to
civilization, then explored the sea passage north of Asia. Searching
westward, she settled Newfoundland, founded the United States,
built Canada, which created the Canadian Pacific route to the Indies,
and traversed the sea passage north of America. On the Panama
route, she built a West Indian empire; on the Mediterranean route,
her fortress line of Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Egypt, Adon. By holding
all routes, she holds her Indian empire. Is not this the history of the
world?
But there remains to be told the story of Russia’s search for
routes to India and China. That story begins with Martha Rabe, the
Swedish nursery governess, who married a dragoon, left him to be
mistress of a Russian general, became servant to the Princess
Menchikoff, next the lover, then the wife of Peter the Great, and
finally succeeded him as empress of all the Russias. To the dazzling
court of this Empress Catherine came learned men and travelers
who talked about the search of all the nations for a route through
North America to the Indies. Long ago, they said, an old Greek
mariner, one Juan de Fuca, had bragged on the quays of Venice, of
his voyages. He claimed to have rounded Cape Horn, and thence
beat up the west coast of America, until he came far north to a strait
which entered the land. Through this sea channel he had sailed for
many weeks, until it brought him out again into the ocean. One
glance at the map will show these straits of Juan de Fuca, and how
the old Greek, sailing for many weeks, came out again into the
ocean, having rounded the back of Vancouver’s Island. But the
legend as told to Catherine the Great of Russia, made these
mysterious straits of Anian lead from the Pacific right across North
America to the Atlantic Ocean. Here was a sea route from Russia
across the Atlantic, across North America, across the Pacific, direct
to the gorgeous Indies. With such a possession as this channel
Russia could dominate the world.
Catherine set her soothsayers and wiseacres to make a chart,
displaying these straits of Anian which Juan de Fuca had found, and
they marked the place accordingly at forty-eight degrees of north
latitude on the west coast of America. But there were also rumors
and legends in those days of a great land beyond the uttermost
coasts of Siberia, an island that was called Aliaska, filling the North
Pacific. All such legends and rumors the astrologers marked
faithfully upon their map until the thing was of no more use than a
dose of smallpox. Then Catherine gave the precious chart to two of
her naval officers, Vitus Bering, the Dane—a mighty man in the late
wars with Sweden and a Russian lieutenant—Tschirikoff—and bade
them go find the straits of Anian.
The expedition set out overland across the Russian and Siberian
plains, attended by hunters who kept the people alive on fish and
game until they reached the coasts of the North Pacific. There they
built two ships, the Stv Petr and the Stv Pavl, and launched them,
two years from the time of their outsetting from Saint Petersburg.
Thirteen years they spent in exploring the Siberian coast, northward
to the Arctic, southward to the borders of China, then in 1741 set out
into the unknown to search for the Island of Aliaska, and the Straits
of Anian so plainly marked upon their chart.
Long months they cruised about in quest of that island, finding
nothing, while the crews sickened of scurvy, and man after man died
in misery, until only a few were left.
The world had not been laid out correctly, but Bering held with
fervor to his faith in that official chart for which his men were dying.
At last Tschirikoff, unable to bear it any longer, deserted Bering, and
sailing eastward many days, came at last to land at the mouth of
Cross Straits in Southern Alaska.
Beyond a rocky foreshore and white surf, forests of pine went up
to mountains lost in trailing clouds. Behind a little point rose a film of
smoke from some savage camp-fire. Tschirikoff landed a boat’s crew
in search of provisions and water, which vanished behind the point
and was seen no more. Heart-sick, he sent a second boat, which
vanished behind the point and was seen no more, but the fire of the
savages blazed high. Two days he waited, watching that pillar of
smoke, and listened to a far-off muttering of drums, then with the
despairing remnant of his crew, turned back to the lesser perils of the
sea, and fled to Siberia. Farther to the northward, some three
hundred miles, was Bering in the Stv Petr, driving his mutinous
people in a last search for land. It was the day after Tschirikoff’s
discovery, and the ship, flying winged out before the southwest wind,
came to green shallows of the sea, and fogs that lay in violet gloom
ahead, like some mysterious coast crowned with white cloud heights
towering up the sky. At sunset, when these clouds had changed to
flame color, they parted, suddenly revealing high above the
mastheads the most tremendous mountain in the world. The sailors
were terrified, and Bering, called suddenly to the tall after-castle of
the ship, went down on his knees in awestruck wonder. By the
Russian calendar, the day was that of the dread Elijah, who had
been taken up from the earth drawn by winged horses of flame in a
chariot of fire, and to these lost mariners it seemed that this was no
mere mountain of ice walls glowing rose and azure through a rift of
the purple clouds, but a vision of the translation of the prophet.
Bering named the mountain Saint Elias.
There is no space here for the detail of Bering’s wanderings
thereafter through those bewildering labyrinths of islands which skirt
the Alps of Saint Elias westward, and reach out as the Aleutian
Archipelago the whole way across the Pacific Ocean. The region is
an awful sub-arctic wilderness of rock-set gaps between bleak arctic
islands crowned by flaming volcanoes, lost in eternal fog. It has been
my fate to see the wonders and the terrors of that coast, which
Bering’s seamen mistook for the vestibule of the infernal regions.
Scurvy and hunger made them more like ghosts of the condemned
than living men, until their nightmare voyage ended in wreck on the
last of the islands, within two hundred miles of the Siberian coast.
Stellar, the German naturalist, who survived the winter, has left
record of Bering laid between two rocks for shelter, where the sand
drift covered his legs and kept him warm through the last days, then
made him a grave afterward. The island was frequented by sea-
cows, creatures until then unknown, and since wholly extinct,
Stellar’s being the only account of them. There were thousands of
sea otter, another species that will soon become extinct, and the
shipwrecked men had plenty of wild meat to feed on while they
passed the winter building from the timbers of the wreck, a boat to
carry them home. In the spring they sailed with a load of sea-otter
skins and gained the Chinese coast, where their cargo fetched a
fortune for all hands, the furs being valued for the official robes of
mandarins.
At the news of this new trade in sea-otter skins, the hunters of
Siberia went wild with excitement, so that the survivors of Bering’s
crew led expeditions of their own to Alaska. By them a colony was
founded, and though the Straits of Anian were never discovered,
because they did not exist, the czars added to their dominions a new
empire called Russian America. This Alaska was sold in 1867 to the
United States for one million, five hundred thousand pounds, enough
money to build such a work as London Bridge, and the territory
yields more than that by far in annual profits from fisheries, timber
and gold.
XXXIX
A. D. 1750
THE PIRATES
THERE are very few pirates left. The Riff Moors of Gibraltar Straits
will grab a wind-bound ship when they get the chance; the Arabs of
the Red Sea take stranded steamers; Chinese practitioners shipped
as passengers on a liner, will rise in the night, cut throats, and steal
the vessel; moreover some little retail business is done by the
Malays round Singapore, but trade as a whole is slack, and sea
thieves are apt to get themselves disliked by the British gunboats.
This is a respectable world, my masters, but it is getting dull.
It was very different in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
when the Sallee rovers, the Algerian corsairs, buccaneers of the
West Indies, the Malays and the Chinese put pirate fleets to sea to
prey on great commerce, when Blackbeard, Captain Kidd,
Bartholomew, Roberts, Lafitte, Avery and a hundred other corsairs
under the Jolly Roger could seize tall ships and make their unwilling
seamen walk the plank. They and their merry men went mostly to the
gallows, richly deserved the same, and yet—well, nobody need
complain that times were dull.
There were so many pirates one hardly knows which to deal
with, but Avery was such a mean rogue, and there is such a nice
confused story—well, here goes! He was mate of the ship Duke,
forty-four guns, a merchant cruiser chartered from Bristol for the
Spanish service. His skipper was mightily addicted to punch, and too
drunk to object when Avery, conspiring with the men, made bold to
seize the ship. Then he went down-stairs to wake the captain, who,
in a sudden fright, asked, “What’s the matter?” “Oh, nothing,” said
Avery. The skipper gobbled at him, “But something’s the matter,” he
cried. “Does she drive? What weather is it?” “No, no,” answered
Avery, “we’re at sea.” “At sea! How can that be?”
“Come,” says Avery, “don’t be in a fright, but put on your clothes,
and I’ll let you into the secret—and if you’ll turn sober and mind your
business perhaps, in time, I may make you one of my lieutenants, if
not, here’s a boat alongside, and you shall be set ashore.” The
skipper, still in a fright, was set ashore, together with such of the men
as were honest. Then Avery sailed away to seek his fortune.
On the coast of Madagascar, lying in a bay, two sloops were
found, whose seamen supposed the Duke to be a ship of war and
being rogues, having stolen these vessels to go pirating, they fled
with rueful faces into the woods. Of course they were frightfully
pleased when they found out that they were not going to be hanged
just yet, and delighted when Captain Avery asked them to sail in his
company. They could fly at big game now, with this big ship for a
consort.
Now, as it happened, the Great Mogul, emperor of Hindustan,
was sending his daughter with a splendid retinue to make pilgrimage
to Mecca and worship at the holy places of Mahomet. The lady
sailed in a ship with chests of gold to pay the expenses of the
journey, golden vessels for the table, gifts for the shrines, an escort
of princes covered with jewels, troops, servants, slaves and a band
to play tunes with no music, after the eastern manner. And it was
their serious misfortune to meet with Captain Avery outside the
mouth of the Indus. Avery’s sloops, being very swift, got the prize,
and stripped her of everything worth taking, before they let her go.
It shocked Avery to think of all that treasure in the sloops where
it might get lost; so presently, as they sailed in consort, he invited the
captains of the sloops to use the big ship as their strong room. They
put their treasure on board the Duke, and watched close, for fear of
accidents. Then came a dark night when Captain Avery mislaid both
sloops, and bolted with all the plunder, leaving two crews of simple
mariners to wonder where he had gone.

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Reading Home Cultures Through Books

Reading Picture Books with Infants and Toddlers:

Reading John through Johannine Lenses Stan Harstine

Shipboard Literary Cultures: Reading, Writing, and

Improving Reading Comprehension of Self-Chosen Books

Coming Home To The Grove: Books 1-6 Ford

Historical Etiquette: Etiquette Books in Nineteenth-

The Cultural Sociology of Reading: The Meanings of

Reading Plato through Jung. Why must the Third become

This wide-ranging, comparative, and multidisciplinary collection addresses

Kirsti Salmi-Niklander is a Senior Lecturer in Folklore Studies in the

Marija Dalbello is a Professor of Information Studies in the School of Com-

This interdisciplinary series responds to the growing interest in the home

A Cultural History of Twin Beds

Art and Masculinity in Post-War Britain

Food Identities at Home and on the Move

Ethnographies of Home and Mobility

Home Improvement in Aotearoa New Zealand and the UK

Reading Home Cultures Through Books

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

List of figures vii

Introduction: How to read home cultures through books 1

1 Immigrants being at home in libraries: how the immigrants

2 Literacy, ABC books, and primary readers in Finnish

3 “A parade of home”: representations of home in Greek

4 Books and the creation of the middle-class home in

6 Bookshelves create a cozy atmosphere: affective and

7 Writing home cultures through books at the time of

Marija Dalbello is a Professor of Information Studies in the School of

Books and home cultures: methodological perspectives

Histories, transformations, and reflections

At the time of writing

Rachel Reeves has taken no chances here. Everything is bookcase. No

The image takeout that was commented on was captioned, “… vulnerable

Library services for immigrants during the Progressive era in

The library as a replacement home and “citizenship machine”

The cosmopolitan identities of immigrants are reflected in NYPL artifacts

Librarians in New York and elsewhere, viewing themselves as active

“Immigrants being at home in libraries”—their presence and

Situating foreign-language collections and readers—Searches for

Collecting books in “foreign” languages

In addition to the usual type of student and writer on Slavonic matters,

An immigrant (non-English speaker) as user of resources in their native

Teaching “foreign” populations

Reaching “foreign” language readers and communities

Making the library branches contact grounds in “foreign” neighborhoods

Situating libraries as institutional home—Searches for “home” in the

Situating immigrants as users of libraries—Searches for “-migrant-,”

The physicality of libraries as homes and placemaking in libraries

Home is located in space, but it is not necessarily a fixed space … it

In this section, “home, as a discursive resource [that is] potentially instru-

The ideological staging of the library as home—NYPL institutional

Figure 1.1 “Seward Park Roof reading room” (ca. 1910b).

Figure 1.2 “Seward Park Children in library” (ca. 1910a).

the information management processes indicated by the efficiency of library

Figure 1.3 documents an interaction in the library branch that is slightly

Domesticated immigrant readers domesticating the library: Friction

[O]ur books are read to pieces … we are altruists playing Cinderella

These librarians saw themselves as “altruists playing Cinderella on short

Figure 1.1 “Seward Park Roof reading room” (ca. 1910b).

Figure 1.2 “Seward Park Children in library” (ca. 1910a).