First Library

First edition of Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Soon after the war, in August 1785, six young men organized a brief subscription library. No records remain, but some books were passed onto the new 1795 library of the First Society of Farmington. It comprised 37 members who contributed 380 volumes worth $664, in addition to the leather-bound books from the earlier group. Most were religious and moral volumes, but Gulliver’s Travels, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, several French novels and Don Quixote enlivened the fiction section, while The Iliad and Goldsmith’s Poems broadened the poetry shelf.