20 Odd Things You Could Once Borrow From Libraries

It was the autumn of 1943, and at the Grosse Pointe Public Library in a suburb outside of Detroit, people could use a regular library card to check out saws, wrenches, kitchen utensils, and garden tools. The items were donated by a community Rotary Club committee in response to scarcity created by the war. People used them for their homes and for victory gardens. Historians believe this was the first formal tool lending library at any North American public library.

The View-Master was a stereoscopic toy viewer that first appeared at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The viewer had round reels of cardstock loaded with small color photo slides. In the 1940s and 1950s, US public and school libraries had reels of national parks, cities, and historical landmarks. They lent them out with plastic viewers. Library staff marketed the device as an educational tool for teaching geography and science. This practice grew out of a visual learning tradition established by stereograph cards, an earlier 3-D photo format, many years earlier.

When officials from Los Angeles County observed young children stealing toys at various dime stores throughout the Great Depression in May 1935, social workers and probation officers established what would become the longest-running toy lending program in the country. Each kid was given a toy library card allowing him or her to check out any of the numerous toys in the program, including dolls, wagons, and games, on a weekly basis. After returning the toy in good condition for 20 straight weeks, the child earned enough points to take home the toy forever.

During the depression, as money grew thin, jigsaw puzzles became a craze in the US and Canada as a cheap way for the family to entertain themselves at home. Libraries circulated sets of large cardboard jigsaws, and employees counted the pieces upon each return to ensure none were missing. At their peak popularity, American puzzle makers churned out some 10 million a week, both to keep library shelves stocked and to be available for rent at newsstands that charged a small fee for the rental.

Gramophones, which played records, were becoming popular in 1914, but commercial recordings were still prohibitively expensive. The St. Paul Public Library in Minnesota began buying thick 78-rpm shellac discs of symphonies, operas, and folk songs. The discs were easy to crack, but patrons could take them out in paper sleeves and play them on their wind-up phonographs. This was the first circulating record collection at a U.S. public library, long before recorded sound became widely loaned out by other means.

The St. Louis Public Schools Educational Museum, a library extension, sought to make natural history accessible to urban children in St. Louis, where such items were not on display. Beginning in 1905, the museum created wooden crates filled with stuffed birds, dried butterfly wings, rocks, and cotton bolls, which they sent via wagon to schools and libraries around the city. A similar project ran through the museum and library in Newark during the 1910s. These traveling natural history collections have been described as the ancestor of modern science kits.

Stereo cards were pairs of photographs printed on card stock and mass-produced by companies like Keystone View Company and Underwood & Underwood. Viewed through a handheld wooden viewer known as a stereoscope, the two images would merge into one three-dimensional image. For about 30 years, stereoscopes provided the main form of 3D entertainment for American households. They were available in public and school libraries in the United States from the 1890s into the 1920s, where they were circulated with their corresponding viewers in boxes to provide families and students with virtual travel at a time when long-distance travel was not commonplace.

From the 1930s until the 1950s, libraries like the Detroit Public Library, the Milwaukee Public Library, and Dayton’s county library all had circulating collections of hand puppets and string marionettes, all shaped like fairy-tale and historical figures, to promote reading and performance among young patrons. In addition to visiting the library to see a puppet show, teachers and youth could also borrow entire sets of puppets, usually kept in a padded bag with a wooden stage that folds up and can be used at home or in the classroom, to bring to life the stories they learned.

The Sadie Knowland Coe Music Collection, housed at the Evanston Public Library in Illinois, allowed patrons to borrow paper rolls for the self-playing pianos of the day, which were played by reading holes punched in a roll of paper, from 1907 until 1940. The library had a music room with a player piano that was used to check the rolls before they were loaned out. The collection ceased after 33 years in 1940, when gramophone records became more popular in the home.

In the early 20th century, librarian John Cotton Dana, who managed Newark Public Library in New Jersey, argued that works of art should be accessible from everyday households rather than behind museum walls. In 1904, his library started renting out framed reproductions and original graphic prints, complete with hanging wires, on loan for periods as long as several weeks. By 1913, over 56,000 picture and print loans had been made in Newark in one year alone. Brooklyn Public Library eventually offered a fine-art lending program in 1950.

Between the 1920s and 1950s, you could check out Linguaphone boxed sets at many American libraries, including the Los Angeles Public Library, Chicago Public Library, and the Library of the Chathams in New Jersey, to learn a new language on the cheap. If you were an immigrant or traveling abroad, these sets, which contained several 78 rpm discs of native speakers and a textbook, were available for home study.

The American Museum of Natural History, the Newark Public Library, and other institutions loaned out the glass lantern slides, tiny hand-colored photographic plates, from 1892 through the late 1930s to teachers, clergy, and social groups that required illustrations for lectures on geography, science, and history. They sent out thousands of these delicate slides in padded wooden shipping cases, and borrowers projected them in magic lanterns that ran on oil or electricity well before movie projectors replaced them.

Portable filmstrip projectors, slide lanterns and collapsible screens were available for loan by cardholders, for use by scout leaders, teachers and other club officers who lacked the funds to buy their own projection equipment. Many municipal library audio-visual departments in the US maintained these rental inventories well through the 1940s and 1950s. Such loan services were treated no differently than a library’s book or record collections.

In 1938, Harvard University Library began a Foreign Newspaper Microfilm Project to preserve old, brittle newspapers and make rare material available to the public without handling original copies. Archival workers photographed broadsheets onto 35mm roll film. Researchers could request specific rolls of film from Harvard’s archives through an interlibrary loan process that their local branch then mailed to them for viewing on hand-cranked reader machines. This practice extended to state historical libraries well into the 1950s, and changed how genealogical and academic research was conducted.

During the years 1942 to 1945, the US Department of Agriculture, local garden clubs, and libraries across the nation were giving out seeds at the library’s circulation desk, including peas, beans, carrots, radishes, and tomatoes. During World War II, rationing was enforced, requiring people to plant “Victory Gardens” to help reduce the strain on food sources needed for troops overseas. Libraries also handed out books about vegetable gardening, and some readers brought back reports on their crops or saved their seeds for next year.

By the 1890s, big-city libraries like the Boston Public Library, the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the Chicago Public Library had begun offering circulating music for amateurs. Before radio and inexpensive records, it was hard for everyday people to afford to purchase sheet music from publishers. The libraries stocked thousands of books containing sheet music, mostly paper folios of parlor songs, ragtime, opera scores, and chamber music that were checked out and played on pianos and violins in people’s homes.

In the 1950s, the Fine Arts Division of the Brooklyn Public Library and the Music Branch of the Toronto Public Library began offering loans of student-grade violins, acoustic guitars, and practice keyboards to local children interested in learning an instrument but unable to purchase one. The instruments were available to borrowers who signed up for a case with a properly tuned instrument, a bow, and some rosin, for several weeks of home study, at which point they would be returned to the library.

The Seattle Public Library was one of several institutions, including the Library of Congress and Perkins School for the Blind, that amassed libraries of embossed Braille, Boston Line Type and Moon type books, along with raised-relief maps made of paper and wood, for blind people whose demand for reading material was greater than their ability to buy it. In 1904, a federal law allowed these heavy books and maps to be shipped to the recipient free of postage, straight to their doorsteps, decades before the invention of audiobooks.

In 1940, the Cleveland Public Library (Ohio) started its Educational Film Bureau, which loaned documentary, newsreel, and civil-defense films to civic groups, unions, and viewers at home. The Evanston Public Library (Illinois) was doing the same thing through the 1950s. Borrowers could check out film canisters of 16mm safety film from special film desks and show them at school or in union halls. During WWII, Cleveland’s Bureau even distributed educational films about planting a victory garden, decades before the day you’d check out a videotape!

The Pratt-Smoot Act, signed into law by President Herbert Hoover in March 1931, permitted the establishment of recorded-book services for blind Americans in the United States. A few years later, during the worst of the Great Depression, Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers built a series of special, portable record players that fit into tough suitcase-like cases. The Library of Congress and the American Foundation for the Blind shipped these machines and the corresponding heavy “Talking Book” discs, free of postage, to the blind throughout the country. It became the largest government-sponsored recorded-book lending service in the world.

This content was created with the help of AI.