This book recounts the history of an experimental regiona l library service in the early 1950s, a story that has implications for beyond the two Wisconsin counties where it took place. Using
interviews and library records, Christine Pawley reveals the choices of ordinary individual readers, showing how local cultures of reading interacted with formal institutions to implement an
opfficial literacy policy.
Central to the experiment were well-stocked bookmobiles that brought books to rural districts and the one-room schools that dotted the region. Three years after the project began, state
officials and local librarians judged it an overwhelming success. Library circulation figures socared to two-and-a-half times their previous level. Over 90 percent of grade-school children in
the rural schools used the bookmobile service, and their reading scores improved beyond expectation.
Despite these successes, however, local communites displayed deepky divided reactions. Some welcomed the bookmobiles and new library services wholeheartedly, valuing print and reading as
essential to the exercise of democracy, and keen to widen educational opportunities for children growing up on hardscrabble farms where books and magazines were rare. Others feared the
intrusion of government into their homes and magazines were rare. Others feared the intrusion of government into their homes and communities, resented the tex increases that library services
entailed, and complained about the subversive or immoral nature of some books.
Analyzing the history of tensions between various community groups, Pawley delineates the long-standing antagonisms arising from class, gender, and ethnic differences which contributed to a
suspicion of official projects to expand education. Relating a seemingly small story of library policy, she teases out the complex interacetion of reading, locality, and cultural difference. In
so dong, she illuminates broader questions regarding libraries, literacy, and citizenship, reaching back to the nineteenth century and forward to the present day.
"This book is alive with the voices of oral interviews and a density of wonderful details relating to rural Wisconsin's encounter with modern print culture. Though the book is a case study, its
recourse to multiple layers of analysis and its comprehensive attention to the lived experience of individual readers and workers will be of wide significance, helping scholars and students of
the book to think more fully about their objects of study and the questions they bring to them."---Thomas Augst, coeditor of Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United
States
