From Mudie's Lending Library to Bookswim

A 1/31/11 New Yorker article, “The Borrowers,” by Patricia Marx, discusses the many things that can be rented these days, including designer clothes and bags, works of art, baby equipment, kayaks, robots, and even family members and friends (e.g., someone to act as one’s parent, spouse, or platonic friend, as needed; one resourceful, if less than ethical, student rented fake parents to meet with his college dean during his disciplinary proceedings). What caught my eye, however, was that books can be rented as well. I knew, working at a university, that textbooks could be rented. But in addition, according to Marx, anyone can subscribe to Bookswim, which operates something like Netflix, delivering your chosen books to your mailbox. Apparently we have come full circle from the days of Austen and, a little later, the Victorians, when subscription-based lending libraries, such as the famous Mudie’s Lending Library, were common, especially among the middle and upper middle classes. Many young women, especially, paid their guinea a year subscription fee to be able to borrow the latest novels, one at a time. Such membership-only libraries existed in Austen’s Meryton and Sanditon, among others of her settings. From Fanny Burney’s and Jane Austen’s subscription libraries to Bookswim: "what goes around comes around”? But the idea that only some people could afford to buy or rent books back then reminds me of one important and democratic difference (besides that nowadays the book rentals take place on the Internet!) in the present: nowadays we are fortunate to have free public libraries where everyone can afford to borrow books.