ABSTRACT
P.EOPLE WHO NEEDED BOOKS but could not afford them frequently borrowed from other individuals (a minister or community leader, as Franklin and Jarrett did), or from stocks of books kept in places such as taverns and general storesJO In the course of the century, book borrowing also
became formalized via a new institution, the social library. Privately owned and sponsored, these libraries were nonetheless "public" in the distinctively eighteenth-century sense of being a space where civic, religious, and commercial values converged and overlapped.
