What Kind of Books Did Franklin and the Gento Get?

All public libraries in North America up until the second half of the 19th century were subscription libraries like ours. The idea that a city should pay for a public library that should be paid for out of tax revenues was an idea that hardly even existed before the middle 19th century. In 1770, the last we published catalogs of our holdings regularly, we had three or maybe four novels in the library and two of them were Don Quixote.