I have mentioned them before and since then I have come to think more and more about what they might tell us about the growth of literacy during the last years of the 19th and most of the 20th century.
Here alongside the municipally provided public libraries were these private lending libraries. T
hey could be found in bookshops and newsagents and mostly seem to have offered light and romantic novels.
Unlike their council counterparts they charged a small fee but everyone I have talked to maintain the charge was minimal. In some places until the arrival of the public library they offered the only opportunity to lend rather than buy a book.
It is impossible to deduce much from the small number of people who I know used them, but I rather think we are dealing with customers in the lower income groups. Both my mother and her friend were from working class families where incomes were tight.
Likewise Thomas Cuthbert whose newsagents at 64 Sandy Lane lent books was situated amongst rows of smallish terraced houses and it would be fair to assume his trade came from these houses.
It is also difficult to know how many of these lending libraries existed. Just around the corner from Cuthbert’s in 1929 was the newsagent’s and lending library of Harry Jackson at 364 Barlow Moor Road and there must have been more.
Ida Bradshaw visited one in the shop which is still a newsagent on the corner of Beech and Chequers Roads. "It was all fiction and you could only borrow one book at time but could change books several times in one week. From what I recall quite a lot of newsagents had them mainly for people who didn't belong to council library.”
Philip Lloyd whose parents owned the post office on Upper Chorlton Road, remembered
“We had a private lending library here at 268, Upper Chorlton Road, started in my Grandfathers day, maybe soon after the shop was opened in 1909, and lasted till the 1950s.
The books were generally Mills and Boon, or that type, and we had a loyal group of people who paid their 3d per book per week, usually putting their initials in the back when they had read it, in case they picked up the same one again.
We pasted the front of the dust cover onto the inside front cover and our library label on the page opposite, Lloyd's Circulating Library, leaving room for the rubber stamp of the date due back.
In the 1950s, Allied Libraries, on Upper Chorlton Road approached us with an offer to supply the books on a rotating basis, which would give us a bigger range, so that is what we did. They were based in two big old houses on the corner of Wood Road North, where flats have since been built.
Our business was newsagents, stationers, fancy goods, toys, games, greeting cards and sub post office.”
I rather think they were perhaps a little less intimidating than the public library. I always remember the one on New Cross Road as a far friendlier place than Deptford Library which was almost directly opposite.
As befitted a municipally run establishment there was an atmosphere of authoritarian silence punctuated only the sound of the date stamp recording the day of return for the book.
By contrast the book shop was a noisy place. My close family friend and adopted big sister Jill remembers “it was a small place but absolutely packed with books - a lovely, warm place in the middle of winter! I would get Mum her books sometimes - just went to the counter and asked for romances and, between the man's memories and mine; we nearly always managed to find something she hadn't read.
I think you paid a very small sum but I'm really not sure about that.”
Picture; Sandy Lane circa 1910, showing the newsagents which from the late 1920s lent books, Sandy Lane m18194,and 44 Beech Road where Ida borrowed her books, taken by R E Stanley in 1958, m17655 Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council
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