Libraries weren't always for children

When public libraries were created, they did not allow children. Anne Carroll Moore created the first children's library in 1896. The whole story is here.

...you had to be fourteen, and a boy, to get into the Astor Library, which opened in 1854, the same year as the Boston Public Library, the country’s first publicly funded city library, where you had to be sixteen. Even if you got inside, the librarians would shush you, carping about how the “young fry” read nothing but “the trashy”: Scott, Cooper, and Dickens (one century’s garbage being, as ever, another century’s Great Books).

Boston Globe profile

Wonderful story in the Boston Globe. Barefoot is in talks with PBS!