Traveling library
Among its forerunners can be noted the itinerant chapman and ballad seller, the religious colporteur, and the camp library of Napoleon I listed in Bourrienne's Mémoires.
Brown procured 200 selected volumes "about two-thirds of which were of a moral and religious tendency, while the remainder comprised books of travel, agriculture, the mechanical arts and popular sciences."
[citation needed] The cheapness and quickness of modern methods of communication has been like a growth of wings, so that a thousand things which were thought to belong like trees in one place may travel about like birds.
In the United States, the lyceum movement demonstrated the need of libraries to conserve the results of its work.
The first general American traveling libraries supported by public funds were authorized by the New York State Legislature in 1892.
Fixed traveling libraries are lent as a unit and the borrower is allowed no substitutions for titles on the list.
Books on timely topics or those needed to meet changes in community taste can in this way be provided at a minimum cost.
No permanent building or special assistant is needed to make it give fairly satisfactory service if intelligence in selection is shown by the library which issues it.
The traveling library is of special significance in four different directions: The factory and the machine shop, the social club, and the fraternal organization also find it much to their advantage to have immediately at hand a small, well-chosen collection of books changed often enough to prevent their becoming stale.
Practically every well-devised scheme of educational extension, whether lyceum movement, university extension, study club, correspondence course, Chautauqua movement or Sunday school, has recognized the need of a small library to conserve and amplify the results of the instruction.
Women’s clubs in the east also worked to prevent disease, decrease ignorance, and fight poverty.
Western women settlers thought one of their roles was to civilize or reform the new society they were forming in Kansas.
Lucy Johnston stated, “…I thought if we could have a few books, donated by the women who had plenty, we might in some way get them carried out to the women who had none.” A fellow leader stated it was a brilliant idea and Johnston was appointed the head of the traveling library project in Kansas.
The Kansas traveling libraries goals were to re-create the literary culture that was left behind in the eastern states.
It was revealed in letters that at the beginning of the traveling libraries program, many women stated that they yearned for books.
Many of the traveling libraries were kept in farmhouses, railway stations, small stores and post offices.
The beautifully crafted wooden case created to house a miniature book collection was most likely commissioned by lawyer, and member of Parliament, William Hakewell in 1617 as New Year's gift for a friend.
