Booking your own private library

For a modest annual fee, book lovers can enjoy memberships at such venerable sanctums as the Boston Athenaeum.

By Teresa Méndez | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the April 6, 2007 edition

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On a Thursday in January, in a dreary basement room of the Boston Public Library, Bernard Margolis and Richard Wendorf came together for a jovial "debate." There was much posturing. The moderator made good-natured quips about the possibility of having to restrain these two placid looking men, each tucked respectably into a suit. The audience, mostly older women and older men in bow ties, roared in appreciation.

Settling into leather armchairs, Messrs. Margolis and Wendorf set about answering the question "Should the Boston Athenaeum have become the Boston Public Library?"

It was an academic exercise, a query set in the past tense. The Athenaeum, a private library, didn't become the city's public library when it was proposed 150 years ago; today, there's no risk of it being subsumed by its better-known progeny. Yet membership libraries such as the Boston Athenaeum, where book lovers pay a modest annual fee to curl up in a literary sanctum, have long been overshadowed by their public counterparts.

These charming throwbacks to earlier centuries have clung to their roots, with refined, clubby atmospheres. But the low profile that can accompany a members-only institution can also make for a recognition problem. "What's really important for us is that we not be hidden in plain sight," says Richard Wendorf, the director of the Boston Athenaeum.

Membership libraries in the US were originally modeled after the athenaeums and lyceums of England, which increased access to books at a time when most collections were private. By 1876, more than 3,000 dotted the country.

Today, "they're one of the missed sets of cultural treasures," says Diantha Schull, president of the Americans for Libraries Council in New York. But these private libraries can still be found clustered in the Northeast and throughout the South. The youngest, founded in 1899, is the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library in La Jolla, Calif., which costs $40 per year.

The Boston Athenaeum, dating back to 1807, is the country's largest such institution, with 600,000 volumes (in addition to more than 500 pieces of art) and 5,000 members. Stepping through its red leather doors at 10-1/2 Beacon Street is a little like falling down Alice's rabbit hole. Within the 12-story structure, now in the throes of its 200th birthday party, lies an elegant hodgepodge – part library, part museum, part gallery. There is little delineation between where one part leaves off and the next begins: Paintings hang in every room, busts are nestled between bookshelves, and the books themselves – colorful, leatherbound – are works of art.

Just beyond the circulation desk, a gold plaque reads "Here remains a retreat for those who would enjoy the humanity of books."

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