Brooklyn Public Library

The story

The Brooklyn Public Library began not as a civic institution but as a private club. In 1852, prominent citizens established the Brooklyn Athenaeum and Reading Room specifically for the instruction of young men — a subscription library where the rising mercantile class could continue whatever formal education they had already received. Its shelves held biography, economics, history, literature, and philosophy. Today it is the sixteenth largest public library system in the United States by holdings and the seventh by number of visitors, funded by city, state, and federal governments alongside private donors.