William Wood: The Johnny Appleseed of Libraries

Book ban proponents today seem to have a vision of an imaginary library full of Greek classics for adults and The Bobbsey Twins for children. While early libraries varied, they were far from uniformly dull. When people think about historic American libraries, they probably think of Andrew Carnegie, benefactor of library buildings (not books) at the turn of the twentieth century. Or they think of Benjamin Franklin, founder of one of the earliest-known subscription libraries in 1731. But nestled between them is a man you’ve probably never heard of, whose legacy was to seed book collections all over the US: William Wood.

Wood was born in 1777 in the Bunker Hill area near Boston. Not born to wealth, he apprenticed in business in the city and served briefly as a merchant’s clerk in Liverpool at the age of twenty. He then went into a successful import business with his brother, moving earthenware and glassware, sheep from London in 1810, and cotton from New Orleans to New York and London. He engaged in charity work throughout his life, but his biggest passion was providing books, primarily creating membership libraries for the improvement of young workers. 

The Mechanic Apprentices Library Association, which opened in Boston in 1820, was created by Wood for novice craftsmen. The General Society of Mechanics & Tradesmen in New York City wrote to Wood to ask how to start its own library, and he responded by going to New York and creating their library for them, as he did with the Mercantile Library of New York in 1821.

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Wood was a quirky and creative thinker who got the job done. He was known for talking to a businessman about his library idea and then taking books off their shelves on the spot. He was also known for driving a wheelbarrow around town and filling it with book donations. 

According to one writer, William Wood established libraries in “prisons and poorhouses, in churches, in steamboats, in merchant ships, and in the navy.” The mercantile or mechanic apprentice libraries he helped create included those in Boston, New York, Albany, Philadelphia, Liverpool, Montreal, New Orleans, Louisville, Baltimore, Cincinnati, and Wheeling. His very first library project, however, was a library for the little village of Nahant, Massachusetts, then an island community off the coast of Lynn. In 1819, Nahant accepted “ten hundred” volumes from Wood for use by students of the new school and Wood’s vacationing friends. Since 250 unique titles are still in extant*, we can learn a lot about the selections for a very early municipal library.

As expected, the collection contained religious books but included titles about what were then less-popular faiths in New England: Catholicism and Unitarianism. There was a popular novel (The Saracen, or Matilda and Malek Adhel) about a Muslim man falling in love with a postulant nun. There were travelogues, how-to books, history and science books, periodicals, plays, rude humor (The Expedition of Humphry Clinker), biographies, and at least one children’s book (The Ward of Delamere). There was a book about abolition in England (The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade) and a book by an African American man describing how Black people were fully competent to self-govern (Haytian Papers). 

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These books from the original Nahant 1819 collection all have dedications in them, naming who gave each volume. These were not selected by a Puritan with a mind to convert or control readers but were collected from people from all walks of life: politicians, attorneys, pastors, doctors, newspaper editors, librarians, students, farmers, and townsfolk—both men and women.

Many of the donations were clearly thoughtful ones. The governor’s wife presented a gilded Book of Common Prayer. The first Bishop of Boston presented his own pocket Bible in Latin, with its missing title page written in by his own hand. “Ice King” and astute businessman Frederick Tudor made note of what each of his donated books on the law cost him. Publisher Benjamin Russell donated his newspaper, the Columbia Centinel, to the cause. The first librarian of the Boston Athenaeum donated an encyclopedia. 

The concept of offering current ideas as well as classic ones also extended to Wood’s other libraries. For example, the Mercantile Library of New York reported in 1825 that “works of fancy” exceeded all other circulations, and they understood that fiction could be a door to interest in weightier ideas. The merchant clerks even staged a demonstration for more fiction in 1836, and the board acquiesced. That library still exists in Brooklyn, now known as the Center for Fiction.

Beyond the books themselves, the mercantile and apprentice libraries became known for having lecturers on current thought, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Membership libraries paved the way for tax-supported public libraries. William Wood understood the need to read widely and think critically as the key to the American Dream.

Librarians today still understand.

*The digitization of Nahant Public Library’s 1819 book collection was made possible with a Library Services and Technology Act grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Future grants such as this are at risk due to Trump administration cuts.

BY SHARON HAWKES, MLIS

Sharon Hawkes retired from a career directing public libraries in 2023. She has facilitated live and online discussions about book bans, including with organizations such as the Ohio Educational Library Media Association, Defense of Democracy, and Ohio ACLU.