A shoestring circulating library

 Well, after the Christmas and New Year break, it was back to cataloguing the Athenaeum's historic book collection. I'd managed to complete shelves A4 and A5 before the seasonal break, so today I made a start on A3. (A1 and A2 need a ladder, which has health and safety implications, principally that there's someone else there to call triple zero in case I miss my step and fall off the damned thing.)

Before Christmas I'd accumulated enough evidence to show that the people running the library in the latter part of the nineteenth century were buying second hand books discarded by Mullen's circulating library in Melbourne, or imported second had books from England.

Not all books were bought second hand but quite a few of them have been, including this copy of JM Barrie's A Window in Thrums, dating to 1890.

Initially it didn't look to be terribly promising with a circulating library label on the front of the book.

The label was in poor condition and only just legible

but if you stare at it you can make out the words Horsham and Mechanics Institute. At this point I was envisaging the fun I had tracing the circulating library in Ryde, but they had made it easy for me, with a second copy of the label on the inside fly leaf

showing it came from the Horsham Mechanics's Institute - that's Horsham Victoria, not the one in England. 

There was a mechanics institute in the English Horsham but it seems to have closed down in the 1860s. Given that the book in question was published in 1890, I feel confident in saying it is from the Horsham in the western district of Victoria.

We have a partial provenance in the form or two handwritten notes on the flyleaf, one to say it was acquired for 6/- on 02/01/1891 and a second note in a different hand saying it was acquired on 13/12/1901, presumably by the Athenaeum.

In contrast to the Athenaeum, which was clearly run on the smell of an oily rag the Mechanics Institute in Horsham was a well funded organisation which regularly purchased new books as in this article in the Horsham Times of 28 June 1912.

(Horsham Mechanics Institute Building in 2008 - wikimedia commons)

The Mechanics Institute later transitioned to become Horsham's public library. The old Mechanic's Institute building is no longer the town library, but is now home to the Horsham Historical Society.

I had a look on StreetView and the building still looked much the same in 2024, rather unglamorously located next to a Bunning's carpark ...

I guess the only remaining question is why gentlemen were charged a quarterly subscription of three shillings but ladies were charged 2/6. Was it, given the attitudes of the time, because men were expected to use it for serious study, while women only used it to read romances and sensation novels ...?