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Comment by hintymad | Hacker News Reader

Was it Benjamin Franklin who established the public library system in the US? I think it was one of the greatest achievements in civilization. Every town in the US has a nice library for people to relax and to immerse themselves in knowledge or in an beautiful imaginary world.

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Andrew Carnegie basically invented the public library system as we know it in the USA. He built a library in like every town. Thousands of them, I think.

He credited reading books for his success and passed the privilege to everyone else.

Well, largish town in the northeast for the most part.

When my family moved to the rural county in Virginia my father chose to retire to, the county "library" was a metal carrel of used paperbacks in one corner of the basement of the old Courthouse, open two afternoons a week, staffed by a volunteers from a local ladies auxiliary --- it took almost 3 decades of fund-raising before they were able to build a library on a small plot of land donated by the local school system.

And what's noble is that they did it right? People spent three decades just to improve the town, sounds pretty good to me.

That was my point --- Carnegie wasn't doing this alone.

I'd invite you to reconsider the geographic scope and distribution of Carnegie libraries. They were not mostly "largish towns in the northeast".

Here's a list of all Carnegie Libraries in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Carnegie_libraries_in_...

Here are the lists for the rest of the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_library#Lists_of_Carn...

Yeah, but if you look at this list from the perspective of a kid in rural Virginia in the mid-70s --- there were only six in the state, two of them in a city on the coast, and three were academic libraries which were a long ways away, and not within the realm of possibility of visiting and most of them were already closed (only one is still operating as a library).

Didn't get to the nearby college library until a class trip for my senior paper --- in addition to the research for that, checked out a copy of Knuth's _TeX and METAFONT_ which changed the course of my life.

And the one in DC is now an Apple Store.

https://www.apple.com/retail/carnegielibrary/

According to [1], it started with Franklin:

In addition to membership libraries, Benjamin Franklin also played a role in the development of the first lending library. In 1790, Franklin donated a collection of books to a Massachusetts town that named itself after him. Though the town asked Franklin to donate a bell, he determined that "sense" was more important than "sound." Franklin residents voted for those donated books to be freely available for town members, creating the nation's first public library.

[1] https://dp.la/exhibitions/history-us-public-libraries/beginn...

Andrew Carnegie helped establish a whole bunch of public libraries across the US. He's probably the only reason every town has one.

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