I am a library guy. I rode my bike to the library when I was in middle school to pick up Wheel of Time books and drove my old Subaru to the library for angsty Russian novels when I was in high school. I could navigate my university library blindfolded, and when I was a broke, underemployed graduate burning money in the big city without a career or girlfriend to show for it, I still felt like the luckiest guy in Portland because the library was four blocks away, with a good cafe on one side and a decent bar on the other. I know libraries are supposed to have all sorts of salutary effects on the community, offering a safe and useful place for the very young or the marginalized or the under-networked or whatever, but that’s all secondary to me. Libraries have books, and I like books. When they flourish, I do, too.
I thought about this, then, when I heard Ezra Klein on his podcast make a startling claim: “It’s easier to imagine today that we would go to Mars than that we’d create the library – the public library system – from scratch, because our vision of actually having public goods is so attenuated that the imaginary work you would have to do to get there, it just seems a little bit impossible.”
Klein is right, but I’ll get to that in a moment. The context here, as it was for most of the last month, was Elon Musk and his decision to buy Twitter. I won’t recap the whole, baffling story here, but in hindsight, you can see the logic of it: Musk became the world’s richest man through investing in industries extremely specific to the 21st century. After online payment software, electric sports cars, solar panels, neural interfaces, and private spaceflight, social media seems like an obvious next step for a man who deliberately styles himself as a builder for the future.
That this future is privatized, built by corporations for a tidy profit, goes without saying. The biggest cultural and material transformations of my lifetime have been almost entirely driven by markets: social media, content streaming, smartphones, rideshares, GPS navigation. In that same time, the most substantial thing my government has managed to achieve were two monumentally pointless wars and a years-long fight for healthcare reform that ended in a shrug.
Private industry, not the public sphere, seems to have all the vitality these days. If humans really do reach Mars in our lifetime, it’ll probably be a corporate venture, not a government project. And if I was looking for a solution to the ongoing funding crisis for the American public library system, I’d look to CEOs, not Congress. If that sounds cynical, you probably don’t live in Philadelphia.
Besides Harvard and the other colonial universities, Pennsylvania has the oldest library tradition in the United States. In 1731, Benjamin Franklin founded America’s first lending library, the Library Company, opening its shelves to any Philadelphians who could afford the subscription fee, and the nearby Darby Free Library is the country’s oldest public library, in continuous operation since 1743. The city’s current institution, the Philadelphia Free Library, was chartered in 1891 and within five years had one of the highest circulation rates in the world. Within a hundred years, the Free Library had expanded to more than fifty branches throughout the city, with its palatial Central Library on Logan Square as one of the largest library buildings in the country.
In recent decades, though, the decline of the Free Library has become something of a recurring story. A quick search in The Philadelphia Inquirer’s records tells the story. Staffing levels have shrunk by a third in fifteen years, leaving only one delivery driver to manage shipping between 54 branches across the city, and up to a dozen of those closed every day due to lack of staff coverage. The 2007 budget, adjusted for inflation, was $15 million higher than this year’s $42.8 million, a reduction of 25%. A report from two years ago found that Philadelphia’s public school libraries have the worst ratio of librarians to students in the country, with less than ten certified librarians in a district of 200 buildings and 200,000 students. Staffing levels are so low and building infrastructure is so bad that in 2021 alone, two different branches had animal-related closures: a raccoon fell through a hole in the roof at Chestnut Hill, smearing blood and feces all over the lobby; and a skunk lived in Fox Chase Library for a week before it was captured.
What all this adds up to is a maddeningly inaccessible system. Not a single branch is open on the weekends, and only a handful are open past 5:00 PM. Working on a teacher’s schedule, I can just barely access my local library for a few minutes a day if traffic isn’t too bad. Between the limited hours, the poor selection of new books, and the clearly burnt out staff (the librarians, as Anne Helen Petersen has written, are not okay), things are bad enough that I’m thinking of joining an honest-to-god subscription library (Philadelphia has a few) during my summer break.
Would American cities in 2022 be able to build something like a public library system? From my block, it looks like we’re doing a pretty good job of dismantling the one that we have. And Philadelphia is hardly alone: the vulture-capital goblins at Library Systems & Services have scooped up dozens of ailing libraries in the last decade, accepting public funds to manage local libraries at lower cost (and, inevitably, worse service). LS&S branches, taken as a collective, would be the fifth-largest library system in the United States today. Then again, without that private money, we might be more like the United Kingdom, which has lost hundreds of libraries through post-2008 austerity measures. The thread runs through Ali Smith’s wonderful collection Public Library, which alternates between short stories and non-fiction about British libraries and the people who use them. Walking around central London in 2015, Smith had an easier time finding a library-themed restaurant than an actual public library.
Then again, there is another, stranger connection between Ezra Klein’s question about Musk, Mars, libraries, and money. The US and UK library systems weren’t actually a purely public creation. The golden age of public libraries, when palaces like Philadelphia’s Central Library were built, was a direct result of the world’s richest man directing a massive, one-time infusion of capital into the system. Andrew Carnegie, like Elon Musk, was a stubborn, independent-minded, anti-union jerk who thought he was a genius and did much to build the infrastructure of the next century. But where Musk and his fellow billionaires have largely decided to blast their money out into space, Carnegie used his to build libraries: 1,689 of them all over Great Britain and North America, by one count.
To be clear, there are many problems with billionaire philanthropy, and there are definitely better ways to run public institutions that depending on a 10-figure boost from an eccentric industrialist every century. But if Elon Musk every finds himself wavering on his commitment to Mars and Twitter, or else just unsure about how to shore up his reputation, he might do well by us all to think about pulling a Carnegie. After all, you can only name so many craters, valleys, and hills on Mars after yourself, which only be seen by a few dozen weirdos who actually want to live on a dead rock 143 million miles from Earth. Put your name on 1,689 libraries, though, and you’re a hero forever.
Whenever Musk finishes acquiring Twitter, I’ll be sure to tweet him about it.