July 18, 1941 — A boat for every family on the north side
A week after the corner was chosen, the Tribune sent a reporter and a photographer to the library the north side was about to leave.
It was the ground floor of half a large brick mercantile building at 1351 Caledonia Street, green-fronted, with cars parked at an angle outside and bicycles leaning against the curb. Miss Anna B. Pederson had been the librarian there since 1909, the paper said; the library's own records put her charge of the branch at 1911.
The piece was about shelving, of all things. There were more children's books than adult books and nowhere to put them, so Miss Pederson had worked out an arrangement: the top three shelves around the walls for the adults, the lower four for the children, where the smallest readers could reach them. The reporter called it an engineer's problem and her solution ingenious. It was in fact what thirty-six years of being too small looks like from the inside.
Then the article did something no council minute ever does. It told you what the north side was reading.
Animal stories and historical fiction were top-heavy favorites among the children. Older girls preferred mysteries and books about college life. Men went for westerns and historical novels. Women, the paper said, took their chief satisfaction in the drama of love's complications, mysteries and lighter fiction. Among the hobby readers, one subject outranked everything else.
"We've had so many boat books in circulation that one would think there is a boat for every family on the north side."
— Anna B. Pederson, The La Crosse Tribune, July 18, 1941
After the boats came stamps. The women read about old furniture, dishes and glassware; several men worked through automobiles, mechanical blueprinting and engineering. There were thirty-nine magazines. There was a rental shelf of new books at two cents, restocked monthly, the titles moving onto the ordinary shelves after about six months.
Miss Lilly M. E. Borresen, the city librarian, supplied the history. The branch had begun on March 4, 1905, with 225 books in Brakke's drug store, and between that day and the thirtieth of June it lent out 1,862 of them. In 1907 the reading room became an official library; in its first year it circulated 13,818 books, only 4,438 of them to adults. By 1915 it was lending 27,665 from a stock of 2,904. By 1929, 54,176.
And then the Depression came, and the figures made a handspring.
In 1932 the north side branch lent out 89,634 books from a collection of 8,068. Two thirds of them went to adults.
"Circulation has been a perfect barometer of the amount of unemployment. When there is more employment, circulation is down; with less employment, circulation is up."
— Lilly M. E. Borresen, city librarian, July 18, 1941
The quarters were so crowded that the shelves could not hold the books assigned to them. The library got away with it only because so many of its books were out of the building at any one time, in the houses of the north side, being read.