I recently shared the following ABC news story to Mastodon:

It’s quite an interesting little story about how people opening up an old fireplace found a library book forgotten for 150 years in a box hidden in the fireplace.

Kiama, about 120km south of Sydney, first became a population centre in the 1830s gaining a Post Office in 1841.

Around the same time as it acquired a post office, it also acquired the various features of mid Victorian society, a school of arts, a literary society and by the 1860s a public library.

Like many public libraries at the time, subscribers paid a modest fee to help finance the operation of the library, pay staff, who were often volunteers, an honorarium, and of course, buy books.

What it shows is that the library was important to the community and how important the School of Arts/ Mechanics Institute movement was to developing intellectual life in communities outside the colonial capitals in the nineteenth century.

While sometimes it seems as all the nineteenth century holdings of the Athenaeum are nothing but sensation novels, and the early twentieth century holdings crime, mystery and romance novels, it’s not quite true, there are books of chicken husbandry and of course important works such as an early (1863) edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species.

In mid nineteenth century Australia, books were expensive, mostly imported from the United Kingdom.

Community resources, such as Mechanics Institute Libraries were important not only in providing entertainment in the form of sensation novels but also access to knowledge …

Source: Aberystwyth University Collections