Fifty Subscribers at Forty Shillings

There was no good bookseller in Philadelphia and books came dear from England. I wanted to read a great deal more than I could afford to own, and so did every man in the Junto. The obvious answer was to get rich enough to buy books. I did something else instead.

First we tried the small version. Each member brought his own books into our meeting room so the whole company could use them. It answered well enough for a time, and then it did not, and we each carried our books home again. That failure is the useful part of the story.

So I set on foot my first project of a public nature, a subscription library. I drew up the proposals, had them put into proper form by Brockden the scrivener, and with the help of my friends procured fifty subscribers at forty shillings each to begin with, and ten shillings a year after that.

Fifty men who could not afford a library apiece now had one between them. We afterwards obtained a charter and increased the company to a hundred. That became the mother of all the North American subscription libraries, and it did more for the general conversation of this country than anything I ever printed.

You are very likely trying to afford something alone that you could arrange to share. Count the people near you with the same want. Draw up the proposal. Fifty subscribers at forty shillings built the first public library in America, and not one of us was a rich man.