CENTENNIAL HISTORY OF THE YELLOW SPRINGS LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
Compiled through 2001 by Amy Harper

Copyright May 2001 Yellow Springs Library Association

The year was 1899, the place Yellow Springs, and the women in the Social Culture Club were on a mission. They wanted to encourage people, and especially young people, to read. But there was no place to do that. The school libraries were inadequate, and the Antioch College library was closed to the public. What Yellow Springs needed, felt the Social Culture Club, was a public reading room. So, "with no funds at hand buy only an abiding faith that what should be could be," the club, according to a 1935 history, "undertook to supply that need."

They rented a room in a corner on the first floor of the DeNormandie building (now Deaton's Do It Best Hardware). The Women's Christian Temperance Union offered its furniture in exchange for use of the room for its bi-monthly meetings. With the space secured, the Social Culture Club turned its attention to a more literary pursuit: filling the shelves of the reading room. With club president Leora Bowyer Davis in the lead, the women went around the village knocking on doors, soliciting magazines for the fledgling library. And the day the reading room opened for business, everyone who came to the festive reception had to bring a book for the permanent collection. Thus was born the child that would grow into the Yellow Springs Library.

When Mrs. Mary Ellis Tucker was appointed the first librarian on March 31, 1899, the library, she reported, was already "a good sized child, with 77 volumes waiting to be placed upon the shelves," as well as a few old magazines and papers.

Most of the reading materials in the library's early years was donated. But a penny-a-book rental fee, fines and donations by Social Culture Club members provided the library with enough income to purchase subscriptions to six new magazines that first summer "to give the reading table a taste of literature." It also purchased its first installment of books, 19 in all, at a cost of $3.40; an encyclopedia and a dictionary were purchased on time. The library also subscribed to the Traveling Libraries offered by Ohio State University, which provided books, "many of them among the best in the english [sic]language," on a rotating basis. By 1901 the library had purchased 120 new books and the book collection had grown to 860; magazines and papers numbered around 4,000. Among the 15 magazines the library subscribed to were Harper's Bazaar, Ladies' Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Scientific American, Critic and Cassell's Little Folks.

To be continued.