I love my local public library. I have full access to all the content here. None of this “Limited Preview” stuff or accessible-for-members-only notices.

More than any other institution in my city the public library is the most effective melting pot of economic and social categories. The highly educated, the people who will eat supper at a soup kitchen, the recent immigrant — and everyone else, all of us — are here. And everyone seems to feel at home.

“There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.“¹ (Andrew Carnegie)

1. Andrew Carnegie, as cited by Thomas R. Hensley, The Boundaries of Freedom and Order in American Democracy (Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2001) p. 186 [↩]