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Bookplate Index by Library or Collector
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Los Angeles Public Library Los Angeles made several abortive attempts to establish some sort of city library in the latter half of the nineteenth century before a successful effort in the 1870s. As early as 1844, a reading room had been established in the city, but it did not last long. In 1856, a Mechanics’ Institute was set up, but stayed open only two years. After another attempt in 1859 which did not outlive the Civil War years, a group of civic leaders serving as trustees formed the Los Angeles Library Association on 7 December 1872. For a number of years it was in fact a subscription library, charging a fee for the use of its books. In 1878 it was officially renamed the Los Angeles Public Library, although it continued to charge a fee. One of the outstanding early librarians was Tessa Kelso, a woman with remarkable foresight and administrative ability, who was in charge of the library from 1889 to 1895. It was she who finally eliminated subscription charges. Another of her acts was to do away with the ladies’ reading room, which had been set up at a time when the library was primarily for “men only.” In addition, she set up a training class in 1891, in an effort to provide some trained workers for the library. (This program lasted until 1932, when, after having become a professional library school around 1914, it closed due to the financial pressures of the Depression. In 1936, its records, and its alumni organization, were taken over by the School of Library Service at the University of Southern California.) Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it is to Tessa Kelso’s credit that she was able to form a rather miscellaneous accretion of books into a true library collection, doubling their number at the same time to about forty thousand volumes. During these years the city was growing in population from around fifty thousand in 1890 to around one hundred thousand in 1900. In many ways the library reflects its environment. The presence of the film industry has stimulated the development of an extensive collection of popular fiction. As one might expect, works on aeronautics and aerospace are also heavily collected. Another early librarian, Charles Lummis (1905-1910), who was also an historian, began an important assemblage of material on the history and literature of the western states, Mexico, and especially California. And while the library was not the first public library in the United States to establish branches, it did respond to the city’s sprawl by establishing, around 1900, a system of branches that now number more than sixty. The library was also an early practitioner of departmentalization, open shelf access, and work with children. Today the Los Angeles Public Library is one of the largest public library systems in the United States. Indeed, by 1964, the library could claim the highest circulation in the nation. It maintains a collection of over four and a half million volumes and all types of media and subscribes to more than seven thousand periodicals. It serves, however, only metropolitan Los Angeles; The Los Angeles County Public Library, a separate institution of nearly equal size and circulation, serves the entire county. According to Los Angeles Public Library bibliographer John D. Bruchman, the bookplate on our cover “was adopted in 1889, and was the first official book identification of the Los Angeles Public Library. It came in two colors, red for reference books and green for circulating copies. . . . The plate was used, with minor changes, until 1903." Phillip A. Metzger Graduate
School of Library Science The University of Texas at Austin
[Originally published in Journal of Library History, vol. 12, no. 3 (Summer ]
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| Last updated June 30, 2001 |
