" public-spirited altruism that we should applaud – or is it a nostalgia for a world that has now disappeared and will never return? The educated and affluent part of our community takes it for granted that public funding of the arts and the facilitation of recreational reading is part of the core functions of government. But the public library – in the sense of a funded collection available free to anyone who wants to use it – has only existed since the mid nineteenth century, a mere fraction of the history of the library as a whole. If there is one lesson from the centuries-long story of the library, it is that libraries only last as long as people find them useful. "

― Andrew Pettegree , The Library: A Fragile History