The popularity of little free libraries has exploded over the past fifteen years and there are now thousands of neighbourhood book-sharing boxes across Canada.
Over a century ago, another type of miniature library could be found in Newfoundland and Labrador’s most isolated communities: travelling book boxes supplied by the Grenfell Mission.
British medical missionary Dr. Wilfred Grenfell and the organization he founded are best known for providing free medical care along the coasts of Labrador and northern Newfoundland, but they supplied other essentials as well.
An article published in the mission’s quarterly magazine Among the Deep Sea Fishers in 1911 described the varied work aboard Grenfell’s hospital ship:
“One man comes to have a tooth pulled, another to have his finger dressed, the third to post a letter to his sweetheart; this one wants a letter written and another wants his read; this good lady wants pills because she has been sick, while her friend with her wants medicine “so if she is sick”; yet another borrows a “circulating library” for the winter, and they all want a “bit o’ readin” which means papers or magazines.”
– Among the Deep Sea Fishers
Grenfell was sent to Newfoundland and Labrador in 1892 by the U.K.-based Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen to serve the needs of European families who fished the Labrador Sea and Gulf of St. Lawrence over the summer.
When he found there was no doctor for a population of 20,000 to 30,000 people, he decided to return every year and extend his medical practice to European settlers and Indigenous people who lived in the area year-round.
He soon discovered local residents were in need of more than just bare necessities like medicine and clothing — they were craving intellectual stimulation, too.
According to Grenfell, his hospital ship was steaming along the coast of Labrador one day when it came upon a man in a small fishing boat waving an improvised flag. Assuming there was some medical emergency, they pulled up alongside and brought him on board but it wasn’t medical care the elderly man was seeking.
“I wanted to ask you, doctor,” he said, “if you had any books you could lend me. We can’t get anything to read here.”
“Haven’t you got any books?” asked Grenfell.
“Yes, sir,” the man replied. “I’ve got two, but I’ve read them through and through long ago.”
Much to Grenfell’s surprise, he pulled from his bag Plutarch’s Lives and the works of Josephus, classics of ancient literature.
The crew scrounged together what reading material they could and sent the man happily on his way, but the incident made Grenfell realize just how inaccessible books were to northern communities.
At the time, there were no free, public libraries in Newfoundland or Labrador. Residents of St. John’s could borrow books from membership-based private libraries but outside the capital city there were few resources.
Grenfell had wooden cases custom built to hold fifty books and began soliciting donations, mostly through the mission’s support branches in the United States. Novels, magazines and newspapers poured in, sent by individuals, charities, youth groups and publishers.
Each miniature library was fitted with a tag to record the date it was issued and four screws so it could be attached to the side of a building out of the reach of roaming dogs. Grenfell had heard about a team of sled dogs that had broken into a Moravian Church in Labrador and eaten the prayer books because they smelled of blubber from parishioners’ hands.
The libraries were distributed to coastal communities, where reading could fill the long winter evenings between fishing seasons.
English literacy may have been passed down through some families while others were taught to read by Moravian missionaries. As schoolhouses opened, children shared their lessons in the ABCs with their parents, and those who couldn’t read had others read aloud to them.
When the hospital steamer made its summer rounds, each box was collected and moved to the next outport up the shore so that towns had access to new books every year.
The project wasn’t all smooth sailing. Grenfell later recalled that “some books were lost overboard, some got wet and mildewed, some got burnt, some were used to paper walls, and all got dirty.”
Still, by the First World War seventy-five travelling libraries were in circulation along the coast.
Grenfell’s program was part of a larger travelling library movement that began in New York State in the 1890s and spread across North America. Its goal went beyond alleviating winter boredom, or even promoting literacy.
The libraries were intended to instill Western, Christian values, and Grenfell and his colleagues took a paternalistic approach to curating the books, one that reflected colonial attitudes towards Indigenous people and rural settlers.
Grenfell asked donors to send only books that were “morally edifying or of literary interest” and to keep contemporary crime and adventure thrillers to themselves. One of the mission’s nurses in Harrington Harbour tossed “unsuitable” books into the furnace.
A volunteer from MIT wrote he hoped “knowledge of other countries where life is less harsh would awaken ambition in the hearts of these simple people,” referring to Inuit, and “would give them some standard at which to aim.”
In the 1920s, the Newfoundland government initiated its own travelling library program, and in 1935 the legislature passed an act to establish a Public Libraries Board.
Travelling library services continued into the early 1980s with bookmobiles and even a book boat.
So, the next time you pass a little free library, remember that N.L.’s first free book boxes owed their beginnings to an insatiable hunger for literature in even the most remote corners of our province.
Source: CBC Newfoundland & Labrador