Introduction: The Continuing Depression

Abstract

Margaret Herdman's study of the impact of the Depression on public libraries is unflinching and unemotional, whereas R. L. Duffus's study of libraries in ten metropolises gives more of the color of the era, even if it is more anecdotal than statistical.2 Along with Edward Stanford's unparalleled if somewhat dry study of library extension under the WPA, these works comprise the principal contemporary studies, aldiough several other texts not devoted to the Great Depression per se are usually cited in a review of the period.3 First is Louis Round Wilson and Edward A. Wight's review of the eleven Rosenwald Fund countywide library demonstrations in the South, die result of a gift of $500,000 from the renowned Sears, Roebuck and Co. benefactor, Julius Rosenwald. [...] they survived the decade and became thriving concerns only a short time after Wilson and Wight completed their study.\n James V. Carmichael's summary of the work of the ALA's regional field agent for the South, Tommie Dora Barker, and Mary Mallory's digest of Mary Utopia Rothrock's TVA experiment both deal with profoundly influential professional women whose careers reached their apogee during the period.10 Indeed, the era is colorful with strong characters and the extraordinary if somewhat quaint lengths to which librarians in the 1930s went to extend and promote their services, among them horse-pack delivery and houseboat libraries, bayou mobiles and store-front libraries.