Items17The creator’s order
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John Jacob AstorBorn 17 Jul 1763America's richest man of his day left 400,000 dollars in his will in 1848 for a free reference library in New York, encouraged by the writer Joseph Cogswell, who became its first librarian. The Astor Library opened in 1854, though it did not lend books and kept short hours. In 1895 it merged with…0i - 2
Joshua Bates (financier)Born 10 Oct 1788A Massachusetts-born banker who made his fortune at Barings in London, Bates gave Boston 50,000 dollars in 1852 on condition the city build a library free to all and provide a building, then gave tens of thousands of books. The Boston Public Library, the first large free municipal library in the…0i - 3
George PeabodyBorn 18 Feb 1795Peabody, the London-based American banker, founded the Peabody Institute in Baltimore in 1857, including a free reference library whose five-tiered cast-iron stacks are among the most admired library interiors in America. He also funded a library in his home town, now Peabody, Massachusetts. The…0i - 4
James LenoxLenox, heir to a New York merchant fortune, collected rare books, including the first Gutenberg Bible brought to America, and in 1870 incorporated the Lenox Library to make them public, building it on Fifth Avenue. Access was famously restrictive at first, by ticket only. Merged into the New York…0i - 5
Enoch PrattBorn 10 Sept 1808Pratt, a Baltimore hardware merchant, gave the city a central library and four branches in 1882 plus an endowment, on the condition that the city pay an annual sum towards running it. That arrangement, the donor building and the public paying upkeep, became a model Carnegie later copied. The Enoch…0i - 6
Walter Loomis NewberryBorn 18 Sept 1804Newberry, a Chicago banker and property speculator, died at sea in 1868, and his will left half his estate for a free public library if his daughters died without heirs, which they did. The Newberry Library opened in 1887 as an independent research library in the humanities. It is free to use for…0i - 7
Samuel J. TildenBorn 9 Feb 1814Tilden, a wealthy lawyer and the Democratic presidential candidate who narrowly lost in 1876, left most of his fortune to establish a free library in New York. Relatives contested the will and won, so the Tilden Trust received only around two million dollars of the intended sum. That was still…0i - 8
Henry TateBorn 11 Mar 1819Better known for the gallery that bears his name, the sugar refiner Henry Tate also paid for public libraries in south London in the 1890s, including at Brixton, Streatham, South Lambeth and Balham, once the local parishes had adopted the Public Libraries Acts that let them levy rates for upkeep.…0i - 9
Andrew CarnegieBorn 25 Nov 1835The scale is unmatched: Carnegie paid for 2,509 library buildings between 1883 and 1929, more than 1,600 in the United States and hundreds in Britain, Canada and elsewhere. His terms were strict and sensible, requiring towns to provide the site and pay ten per cent of the building cost every year…0i - 10
John Passmore EdwardsBorn 24 Mar 1823Passmore Edwards, a Cornish carpenter's son who made money from newspapers and magazines, funded around seventy public buildings in the 1890s and 1900s, including some two dozen libraries in Cornwall and London. He refused a knighthood twice and tended to fund places he felt underserved, such as…0i
