The Institute Library

History

The Institute Library, also called the Young Men’s Institute Library, is a private membership library in New Haven founded in 1826 by mechanics for “mutual assistance in the attainment of useful knowledge.” Atlas Obscura notes 19th-century talks by Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Ward Beecher, and Anna E. Dickinson, a shrink after the city public library opened in 1887, and a later return to public programs. Its catalog follows a system devised by librarian William Borden, not Dewey. (Atlas Obscura.)