<P> The Liverpool Subscription Library was a gentlemen only library . In 1798, it was renamed the Athenaeum when it was rebuilt with a newsroom and coffeehouse . It had an entrance fee of one guinea and annual subscription of five shillings . An analysis of the registers for the first twelve years provides glimpses of middle - class reading habits in a mercantile community at this period . The largest and most popular sections of the library were History, Antiquities, and Geography, with 283 titles and 6,121 borrowings, and Belles Lettres, with 238 titles and 3,313 borrowings . </P> <P> Private subscription libraries held a greater amount of control over both membership and the types of books in the library . There was almost a complete elimination of cheap fiction in the private societies . Subscription libraries prided themselves on respectability . The highest percentage of subscribers were often landed proprietors, gentry, and old professions . </P> <P> Towards the end of the 18th century and in the first decades of the nineteenth, the need for books and general education made itself felt among social classes created by the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution . The late 18th century saw a rise in subscription libraries intended for the use of tradesmen . In 1797, there was established at Kendal what was known as the Economical Library, "designed principally for the use and instruction of the working classes ." There was also the Artizans' library established at Birmingham in 1799 . The entrance fee was 3 shillings . The subscription was 1 shilling 6 pence per quarter . This was a library of general literature . Novels, at first excluded, were afterwards admitted on condition that they did not account for more than one - tenth of the annual income . </P> <P> The first national libraries had their origins in the royal collections of the sovereign or some other supreme body of the state . </P>

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