Lending library
In a broader sense, every library that lends books is a lending library , in the narrower sense it is a commercial enterprise that makes a book available for a defined period of time for a certain fee . It is a form of commercial book lending that is no longer in use today.
History of the Lending Libraries
Like the reading societies, the lending library came into being during the Enlightenment to overcome the discrepancy between purchasing power and reading interest. It had an important function for the supply of literature , because it was used by almost all social classes. Different types emerged according to the population, size and audience. The dominant feature was the pure lending company, which was mostly run by a bookstore , often together with a reading group , less often in the main business. The holdings fluctuated between a few hundred books in "Winkelleih" libraries up to several tens of thousands in large institutions. The "novelty reading circle" and the "literature institute" developed as new forms of organization in the second half of the 19th century. In the “novelty reading circle” the books came into circulation completely new, were sold as antiquarian books after the first signs of use and were not marked as loan books. In the German Empire, "Fritz Borstells Reading Circle", founded by the Nicolaische Buchhandlung in Berlin in 1864/65, achieved a dominant position, in Austria the "Literature Institute Ludwig & Albert Last" in Vienna and in Great Britain that of Charles Edward Mudie in London in 1842 founded "Mudie's Select Library", which by the end of the 19th century already comprised over seven million volumes.
While the lending libraries initially created their holdings in many encyclopaedic forms , after 1815 the larger shops also increasingly concentrated on entertainment literature . Before the advent of the newspaper novel and for decades afterwards, the lending library was a prerequisite for a broad range of fiction. Most novels were produced for lending libraries in small editions and at high prices. The lending librarian's “bread items” were the genres of trivial literature , in Goethe's time the family, ghost, robber and chivalric novels . In addition to the successful authors, the novelists at home and abroad who set the tone at the time and are valued today were fairly well represented. The fashion waves in entertainment literature can be read from their holdings.
The number of lending libraries in Germany was 617 in 1865 and rose to 1,056 by 1880. At the end of the 19th century there was a crisis in the book trade, which resulted from a number of factors. The main competitor was the press , which, based on the French model, was increasingly first publishing narrative literature in the feature pages. Since the paperback classic straps (Meyer, Reclam), good literature has also been affordable for everyone; Novel newspapers, cheap series of novels, colportage and magazine novels made it possible for all classes to buy entertainment literature. Propaganda for the “good book” and polemics against loan reading accompanied the expansion of the public library system in the course of the reading hall movement since the end of the 19th century.
In the last years of the Weimar Republic the “modern” or “pawnless” lending libraries spread. In 1932 there were 10,000 to 18,000 book lenders; the industry was overstaffed, and competition drove down rental fees. To represent interests and regulate the trade, separate institutions were formed in 1932/33: the “Reich Association of German Lending Libraries”, the “Association of Publishers interested in Lending Libraries” - above all Wilhelm Goldmann with his crime novels - and the specialist group “The German Lending Libraries” within the Booksellers' guild, representing the retailers. The inclusion in the cultural policy of the Third Reich was accompanied by an upgrading and restructuring of the industry, which was of interest to the National Socialists due to its broad impact. The incorporation of the lending libraries into the Reichsschrifttumskammer (Reichsschrifttumskammer) restricted the number of businesses and set minimum lending fees. Under National Socialism and under Allied occupation, the holdings were “cleaned up”. Since the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels did not grant lending booksellers full membership, the trade (around 28,000 lending outlets in 1960) reunited in its own organization after the Second World War, the "German Booksellers Association" (1960–1973).
The decline began with the spread of television and the triumph of the paperback after the mid-1950s. But the number of operations remained high for a long time because large distributors set up hire outlets en masse in shops outside the industry. In addition to books from the normal publishing book trade - a cross-section of what the book clubs have to offer - the lending libraries in the Federal Republic of Germany mainly produced special loan book publishers. The main part of the holdings consisted of "women's novels" (romance, aristocratic and castle, doctor and homeland novels, etc.); the "men's novels" included crime novels, science fiction novels and westerns. In the GDR, private lending libraries were regulated and suppressed from the 1950s onwards. In contrast to the 18th and 19th centuries, the literary communication process that the lending libraries organized in the 20th century was largely isolated from the literary-critical public.
Modern lending libraries often work with mandatory borrowing.
literature
- Georg Jäger : The German lending library in the 19th century. Spread - organization - decay . In: International Archive for the Social History of German Literature. Volume 2. Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen 1977. pp. 96-134. PDF
- Georg Jäger (Hrsg.): The lending library of the Goethe time. Exemplary catalogs . Gerstenberg, Hildesheim 1979, ISBN 3-8067-0758-8 .
- The lending library as an institution of literary life in the 18th and 19th centuries . Hauswedell, Hamburg 1980, ISBN 3-7762-0200-9 .
- Alberto Martino: The German Lending Library . Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1990, ISBN 3-447-02996-X .
- Jörg Weigand: Dreams on Thick Paper: The loan book after 1945 - a piece of book history, Baden-Baden 2nd edition 2018, ISBN 978-3848748938
