Sinossi
In 1876, Sarah Baldwin bequeathed the community a personal library of 100 volumes that she and her late husband had carefully gathered and prized over their lifetimes. This quiet act by a Newtown, CT bibliophile set off a roller-coaster history of competing ideas about who should be able to borrow books, whether access should be free, and, in a town divided geographically be religion and economics, where to locate a town library. Dan Cruson crafts a fascinating story of libraries in private homes, in annexes of a fire department and post office, and a predecessor to the Cyrenius H. Booth Library at the head of Main Street. He chronicles how the sweeping benevolence of another woman, Mary Elizabeth Hawley, stunned the town more than five decades after Sarah Baldwin was so inspired, by providing in her will for a new library bearing the name of her grandfather to be built on Main Street. In the last half of the book, the author traverses the past 75 years.
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