History of Berea College Library

              EX LIBRIS                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 FRIENDS ARE FOR LIBRARIES ARE FOR BOOKS ARE FOR PEOPLE ARE FOR                                                                                                                                 FOR 110 YEARS . . . . .a library rich                                                                                                                                                                                                      in history and in friends . . . . .                                                                                                                                                                                                               with a record of pioneering, of                                                                                                                                                                                                                      reaching out to young and old in                                                                                                                                                                                                    the mountains . . . . .HUTCHINS LIBRARY                                          
1870-1980.
Walk into the handsome Hutchins Library today with its 200,000 books
and hundreds of magazines and, as you look about, you wouldn't believe the
pioneer struggle that has gone before. Libraries are apt to be taken for granted
along with the books they store in today's electronic world. At term-paper time
college libraries tend to be heavily haunted by students but how many have time
for books and libraries the rest of the year. It was not always thus.
In many ways since 1870 Berea's library has made history...Kentucky
history and sometimes national history. For 27 years from 1916 to 1943 its
book wagon and later book car delivered books and other reading material house-
to-house and school-to-school on mountain backroads. From 1930 to 1940 Berea's
library gave away each year an average of some 11,000 books, magazines, newspapers and pictures to the neediest book-public in the U.S.
Can a book be called a necessity? What about those extra elementary
spellers given to one-room schools which only had two such books for thirty
pupils. Or consider the large-print Bibles that were college gifts to lonely
homes on the book wagon route. Or count the fifty wooden box "libraries" of 25
books each which were furnished as the complete libraries for those one-room
schools where each book was read by all students plus all of the families in the
area. Berea's library was the largest college or university library in Kentucky
until 1919 but it was more. Through programs of outreach or extension, or simply
neighborliness, it brought books to hundreds of people who couldn't possibly
visit the library. The old slogan was true, "Set idle books to work, send them
to Berea".
In this list of a century of library events so many first-of-their-
kind achievements are hidden behind its dates and statistics. Hidden, too, in
the few lines each year, is the dedicated efforts of scores of library people.
This is also a record of "make-do" years; of cloth-wrapped bricks used to save
money on metal book-supports, of a refurbished wash-stand being used to display
books, or of librarians on miniscule salaries donating part of that salary so
that a book wagon could continue to make its calls on mountain neighbors. The
letters NSF might be the thread that bound those years together...NSF standing
for not sufficient funds.