ABSTRACT
The origins of the knowledge content of any library is inevitably mysterious, and it is this, allied to the belief in progress, that in modern society has generated the myth of the library as the culmination of a linear evolution of knowledge. Early public library buildings were treated in a monumental fashion also because there was an expectation that, just as they represented the end product of a historical process, they were also symbols of the 'social engineering' and accumulation of knowledge that was to come. The monumentality of early public library buildings was not a mistake. The commentary by the Papworth brothers in 1853 remained the only significant guide to library planning for a number of decades. The rapid acceleration in public library adoptions that began in the late nineteenth century, together with the huge injection of philanthropic capital in the generation before the First World War, brought a commensurate expansion in the physical infrastructure of the public library.
