You've Come A Long Way Baby

In an earlier posting I mentioned that many early public libraries had "closed stacks." Well, to my delight, Carole Stuart, our expert in local history, found this floor plan for the original Carnegie library in Collingwood--the one that opened in 1904 and burned down in 1963.

 You will notice a couple of interesting features.  For example, there is a separate reading room for men and women, and men were allowed to smoke in their reading room, something that would not be allowed today.  When you entered the library, after first climbing a steep set of stairs (these would never pass current accessibility standards) and passing through an impressive neoclassical portico, the hall would funnel you directly to the librarian's desk.  To the left was the catalogue room, where you would comb through the drawers of the card catalogue, seeking something to read. You noted the title, author and call number of the book you wanted on a slip of paper and presented this to the librarian at her desk.  The librarian would then disappear into the "closed stacks" behind her desk and retrieve the book for you. While it was a very secure system--you would lose very few books this way--I don't think many people would want to return to it.  Most of us enjoy browsing the shelves and the serendipitous encounters with books that ensue, those unexpected gems we discover while looking for something else.

--Ken Haigh