"Circulating library" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this time a circulating library in Edinburgh, founded, I believe, by the celebrated Allan Ramsay, which, besides containing a most respectable collection of books of every description, was, as might have been expected, peculiarly rich in works of fiction. It exhibited specimens of every kind, from the romances of chivalry ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... genesis of the book. I appointed a jury of matrons to judge each chapter before it went to the Press, and to decide whether it was suited to the restrictions of the circulating library, and whether it would cause real distress or perturbation to three persons whom we chose as representative readers of decent fiction: Admiral Broadbent, Lady Percy Mountjoye, and old Mrs. Bridges (Mrs. Bridges was said to have had a heart attack after reading THE GAY-DOMBEYS—I did not wish ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... when these very novels come out later in three-volume form, with the "mark of the beast" in the shape of a circulating library ticket upon them, they will be fortunate if they are not interdicted altogether by some of the serious families who take in the magazines as ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... throwing kisses as she went. The library she mentioned was one in connection with the school, and somewhat chaotic in condition. Joyce had bought a selected lot of good reading matter in paper covers, with which to start a circulating library, and with the assistance of the Bonnivels, was getting it in shape. In the absence of a catalogue the books were now numbered on the backs, and when issued the corresponding number, on a slip of paper marked the vacant place ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... This is a proof that nothing can be said against my argument requiring a serious answer. Gladstone felt ashamed of the review. It has helped the book; but it would be read even without this and the recommendation of the "Guardian"—so Longman says. One circulating library here has taken twenty-five copies, and wants more. So the book cannot be ignored; and that is all I first of all wished for, aculeum reliqui. As the people of this country, with a few exceptions that one can count upon one's fingers, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... whiskers." It is not unusual to see dark beauties in our own country with a moustache which must be the envy of "young shavers." And, apropos, the poet Rogers is said to have had a great dislike of ladies' beards, such as this last described; and he happened to be in a circulating library turning over the books on the counter, when a lady, who seemed to cherish her beard with as much affection as the young gentlemen aforesaid, alighted from her carriage, and, entering the shop, asked the librarian ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... independent of this, there were two circulating libraries, the property of booksellers, both of which were tolerably well supplied with new books. [Footnote: Talbot's Canada, Vol. I., p. 77. But it appears that there was a circulating library at Quebec as far back as 1779, with 2,000 volumes; it was maintained till a few years ago, when its books were transferred to the Literary and Historical Society.] In this respect Montreal possessed for years decided advantages over York, ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... plan, though more extensive, than that founded some years ago by Mrs. Peter of Philadelphia. The upper portion of the building will be arranged for drawing classes, wood-engraving, and the various branches of Design; and the lower, corresponding in size and general appearance, I intend for a circulating library for our county. Over that School of Design I want you to preside; your talents, your education, your devotion to your Art fit you peculiarly for the position. The salary shall be such as to compensate you for ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... circulating library that Warren patronized occasionally. There was also the nucleus of a free library, but so far people had been too busy to think much about reading, except the scholarly minds. Books were expensive, too, and very few persons accumulated any stock of them. ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... New Hampshire Statesman, the Herald of Freedom, the New Hampshire Observer, all published at Concord; the first political, the second devoted to anti-slavery, the third a religious weekly. In the westerly part of the town was a circulating library of some one hundred and fifty volumes, gathered about 1816—the books were dog-eared, soiled and torn. Among them was the "History of the Expedition of Lewis and Clark up the Missouri and down the Columbia to the Pacific Ocean," which was read and re-read by the future correspondent, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... be furnished the isolated student at a cost little in excess of that of transportation. There is such competition among express companies that there will be little trouble in getting rates of transportation which will render this feature of extension teaching practicable. What Mudie's Circulating Library is to England, the extension travelling library may be to America. The result will be to place in the reach of all the best copyrighted books, and to strangle the reprints of worthless publications that are bought only because ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... family," and we found it uninhabitable from the heat, vegetation scorched into paleness, the very air swooning in the sun, and the gloomy looks of the inhabitants sufficiently corroborative of their words that no drop of rain or dew ever falls there during the summer. A "circulating library" which "does not give out books," and "a refined and intellectual Italian society" (I quote Murray for that phrase) which "never reads a book through" (I quote Mrs. Wiseman, Dr. Wiseman's mother, who has lived in Fano seven years) complete the advantages ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... reading and reflection, is giving them a source of innocent and laudable amusement: and besides, raises them to a more dignified degree in the scale of rationality. Impressed with this idea, a gentleman in this parish, Robert Riddel, Esq., of Glenriddel, set on foot a species of circulating library, on a plan so simple as to be practicable in any corner of the country; and so useful, as to deserve the notice of every country gentleman, who thinks the improvement of that part of his own species, whom chance has thrown into the humble walks of the ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... themselves. There is no escape from this. It gave me great satisfaction to discover, many years later, that my father was one of the five weavers in Dunfermline who gathered together the few books they had and formed the first circulating library in that town. ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... his career. "He was not long," writes Mr Laidlaw, "in going through all the books belonging to my father; and learning from me that Mr Elder, bookseller, Peebles, had a large collection of books which he used as a circulating library, he forthwith became a subscriber, and by that means read Smollett's and Fielding's novels, and those voyages and travels which were published at the time, including those of Cook, Carteret, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... choose, instead, that the youthful Elia were busy so early with one of his favorite Elizabethans. He has himself hinted that he read "The Vicar of Wakefield" in later days out of a tattered copy from a circulating library, yet I would willingly move the occasion forward, coincident to this. And I suspect that the artist Brock is also indifferent to Cowley: for has he not laid two other volumes handy on the shelf for the sure time when ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... the ordering of bindings for any public or circulating library where books are given out to all classes of people, and subjected to the handling which such books must receive, I should, from my experience as a binder, recommend ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... father and two sons, Clarke's, Fulton street, near Orange. I had a nice desk and window-nook to myself; Edward C. kindly help'd me at my handwriting and composition, and, (the signal event of my life up to that time,) subscribed for me to a big circulating library. For a time I now revel'd in romance-reading of all kinds; first, the "Arabian Nights," all the volumes, an amazing treat. Then, with sorties in very many other directions, took in Walter Scott's novels, one after another, and ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... But this reproof, which is telling against individuals, has no justice as against the public. For—and this is generally lost sight of—the public is composed of the class or classes directly addressed by any work, and not of the heterogeneous mass of readers. Mathematicians do not write for the circulating library. Science is not addressed to poets. Philosophy is meant for students, not for idle readers. If the members of a class do not understand—if those directly addressed fail to listen, or listening, fail ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... you about," announced Mrs. Dunbar. "I'm going to a town meeting this morning. We are working for a circulating library, to give reading to the people tied up in the hills. You see stretched out there, over the golf links as far as you can see, are farmers' homes. The folks are always so busy, and always so tired, they very seldom get to our pretty ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... woman. The late Mr. G. Robinson, the bookseller, told me that he had given Ann Yearsley two hundred pounds for the above work, and that he would give her one hundred pounds for every volume she might produce. This sum, with the profits of her Poems, enabled her to set up a circulating library, at the Hot Wells. I remember, in the year 1793, an imposition was attempted to be practised upon her, and she became also involved in temporary pecuniary difficulties, when by timely interference and a little assistance I had the happiness of placing her ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... Hesper, with a confused feeling that people who kept shops read stupid old books that lay about, because they could not subscribe to a circulating library.—"Are you fond of poetry?" she added; for the slight, shadowy shyness, into which her venture had thrown Mary, drew her heart a little, though she hardly knew it, and inclined ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... smiled on us; we had a chicken-soup with a superabundance of laurel. Do you remember an excellent shopkeeper of the Rue du Faubourg Saint Jacques, near the city-gate, who, we were told, not only sold thread, but kept a circulating library? What a circulating library it was! Plays, three odd volumes of Anne Radcliffe's novels,—and if the old lady had never made our acquaintance, the inhabitants of the Faubourg Saint Jacques would never have known of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... knowledge; but my thoughts, as usual, were upon one subject—my parentage, and the mystery hanging over it. My eternal reveries became at last so painful, that I had recourse to reading to drive them away, and subscribing to a good circulating library, I was seldom without a book in my hand. By this time I had been nearly two years and a half with Mr Cophagus, when an adventure occurred which I must attempt to describe with all the dignity with which it ought to ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... father used to say that "woman's looks were his only books and folly was all they taught him," which shows, I suppose, that what he knew about the sex he learned from a circulating library. ...
— The Man Who Drove the Car • Max Pemberton
... and, if he can get nothing better, he will contentedly batten on the tiny paragraphs of detached gossip which form the main delight of many fairly intelligent people. Books are cheap and easily procured, and the circulating library renders it almost unnecessary for any one to buy books at all. In myriads of houses in town or country the weekly or monthly box of books comes as regularly as the supplies of provisions; the contents are ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... on the tablet are, of course, those of the former organization: the "New York Free Circulating Library for ...
— Handbook of The New York Public Library • New York Public Library
... esquire passed among his neighbours for a great scholar, if Hudibras and Baker's Chronicle, Tarlton's Jests and the Seven Champions of Christendom, lay in his hall window among the fishing rods and fowling pieces. No circulating library, no book society, then existed even in the capital: but in the capital those students who could not afford to purchase largely had a resource. The shops of the great booksellers, near Saint Paul's Churchyard, were crowded every day ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sort of how-d'ye-do acquaintance. The case was otherwise. The attorney and the doctor joined our society that their families of ten or twelve sons and daughters might keep under the sixpences and shillings of the circulating library; but they soon became jealous of new books, although they often returned them uncut and unread; and so far from knitting the bonds of acquaintance, we at last thought our plan served to estrange the members, by ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 376, Saturday, June 20, 1829. • Various
... time a circulating library at Edinburgh, founded, I believe, by the celebrated Allan Ramsay, which, besides containing a most respectable collection of books of every description, was, as might have been expected, peculiarly rich in works ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... able to obtain a sight of any periodical whatever; and such would assuredly be our case, as, in the little wild moorland village where we reside, there would be no possibility of borrowing a work of that description from a circulating library. I hope with you that the present delightful weather may contribute to the perfect restoration of our dear papa's health; and that it may give aunt pleasant reminiscences of the salubrious climate of her native ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Caruthers, shaking his sandy head. "That is, they are ours as long as they are here. Once in awhile a man may come in and take one; but the next day, or the next minute, for that matter, we can go out and get another. The Old Ebenezer bar has a circulating library." He yawned and continued: "I think we ought to do well here, with my experience and your learning. They tell me you can read Greek as well as some people can ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... me, that for the present season he had rented a corner of the wagon as a bookstore, which, as he wittily observed, was a true Circulating Library, since there were few parts of the country where it had not gone its rounds. I approved of the plan exceedingly, and began to sum up within my mind the many uncommon felicities in the life of a book-peddler, especially when his ...
— The Seven Vagabonds (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne |
