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Many people think of the Erie Canal as an east-west corridor across the state for either working boats carrying goods such as lumber and gravel from western sources, and food and produce from farms to populated areas, or packet boats carrying passengers. However, it also served as a route for entrepreneurs offering services of various types. Examples of these boats included circus boats, boats with animal menageries, museum boats, boats of "curiosities", religious or mission boats, temperance boats, etc.
Among the different types of boats on the Erie Canal are "book boats" or library boats, boats that carried books for either packet boat passengers or people living along the path of the canal. These boats served as a kind of floating library or bookstore by offering books at various points along the canal. Book boats served to connect books and people on a main transportation route and offered an opportunity for people to find and read books for education or entertainment. Costs of books of course varied, although a sense of their financial value may be gleaned from a list compiled in 1823 by the U. S. Navy. It lists travel books for $1.25, a chemistry book for $3.75, a gazetteer for $5, and a 4-volume set of medical journals for $10.1 Compare this with the wages of agricultural and most other laborers in the early 1830s of approximately $0.50 to $1.00 per day.2
As boats that provided leisure reading materials, book boats may have been packet boats or modified line boats. No known physical book boats have yet been found or preserved from the Erie Canal. Photographs of authentic book boats of the era appear to be non-existent as well, or at least so scarce as to not be found in existing accessible collections to date. A plausible reason for this scarcity is that photography was not generally available until the Civil War era, and the heyday of book boats was most likely from an earlier time period. A search for the existence of book boats therefore must focus on documentary evidence. This article shares what bits and pieces of information have been found so far in first person narratives, as well as in texts that include the history of libraries and literacy.
An important description of types of boats was written by Richard Garrity, an Erie Canal boatman from the City of Tonawanda in the early 1900s. He included library boats in his description of specialized working boats: "The scientific expedition aboard the boat Lafayette that stopped at Gasport in 1826 was the forerunner of other specialized boats that would travel along the original Erie. Soon appeared 'Gospel' or 'mission' boats bringing religion to the people settled along its banks; 'show boats' brought Shakespearean and other plays; and 'circus boats' brought other entertainment. 'Library boats,' like the Encyclopedia of Albany, brought education, by way of books and lectures. Excursion boats took people on sightseeing trips and to places of entertainment along the canal. And ... there was also the bumboat that rowed out to passing canal boats to sell produce, foodstuffs, and notions." 3 Book boats were apparently not alone in bringing entertainment, diversion, enlightenment, or needed materials to people travelling along the Erie Canal.
The existence of the Encyclopedia of Albany that Garrity mentioned proved traceable to a Canandaigua, NY newspaper dated June 30, 1824 that announces the arrival of this exact canal boat in the following way: "Nothing is more grateful to the feelings of a patriot and philanthropist, than to walk around the Canal Basin, and observe the numerous boats passing and repassing through the lock. But among the Canal phenomena, if we may be allowed such an expression, nothing has struck us more forcibly, as a most novel and curious enterprise, than the new and elegant small boat owned by Messrs. Wilcox, and named the Encyclopedia of Albany. Upon each side of this handsome vessel is inscribed in striking characters, E. & E. Wilcox's Bookstore and Lottery Office. On decending [sic] into the cabin, we find it exhibiting an elegant little Bookstore, with about two thousand volumes on the shelves, comprising many of the most valuable works in our language. This floating Bookstore and Lottery Office will move up and down the canal, bearing the riches of science as well as the gifts of fortune, to their respective favorites." 4
Other primary sources that included mentions of book boats come from diaries of travelers along the Erie Canal in its opening years. In a first-person account of his visit to North America written in 1825, a German Duke, Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, described a stationary book boat that sold books from a pier in Albany. In his description he records the name of the owner, as well as what types of books he carried, and where the books were published. As quoted in Hughes & Owen, his entry reads: "We came upon a floating bookstore on one of the canal boats. Mr. Wilcox, who established it about two years ago, travels back and forth on the canal several times a year and it is reported to do quite a business. He sells the classics, some medical and religious books, a few law books, and novels. This gentleman, formerly a merchant in Albany, supports his family who live with him on the boat, entirely from the proceeds of this enterprise." 5 In a footnote, the publishing house of H. & E. Phinney of Cooperstown is named as the company that initiated these floating bookstores on the Erie Canal. H. & E. Phinney was indeed a well-known publishing company in Western New York in the beginning years of the Erie Canal. The books they sold included Bibles, school books, almanacs, and books of local interest. So successful were they in selling books along the canal that they moved from Cooperstown, NY to Buffalo, NY in 1848.
Other forms of library book collections were also documented by early travelers on the Erie Canal. An 1826 diary by Alexander Scott, a Canadian travelling from Quebec to Albany and then across the Erie Canal, records the presence of fixed libraries on board many canal boats. While not serving as a library collection for other travelers, they surely served a library function for the passengers of a particular boat who could read them freely and without cost. Scott wrote that, "... a small library is a very desirable thing on board of these public Packets, in this respect we are far inferior to the Americans, who even in their Canal Boats have generally got a pretty good collection of works of different natures for the use of the Passengers." 6
Another early traveler records the important function of book boats spreading literacy on the Erie Canal. José María Heredia, an exiled Spanish writer from Cuba, waxed poetic about library boats that he encountered on his travels in 1823-1825: "His letters take note of institutions of higher learning and culture, like Yale College and the Philadelphia Museum, and even of humbler indicators of the diffusion of literacy and culture in the American hinterland, like the curious library boats that plied the Erie Canal." 7
Some library historians see book boats as being harbingers of social change. Others see the presence of book boats as an evolutionary step between the subscription libraries of the 1700s and the free public libraries later run by local municipalities in the early 1900s because book boats offered book rental fees that allowed customers to read books for less cost than buying them outright. Martin describes typical rental transactions in this way: Book boats "moved along the Erie Canal after it opened in the 1820's; people came to the dock and rented books for a day or two, read them rapidly, and returned them before the vessel took off for its next stop." 8
Still other library historians view book boats as outright antithetical to the idea of libraries. Klentzin, for example, minces no words: "Whereas social libraries were developed by intellectually-minded collectives interested in personal education and the betterment of society through the reading of 'literature,' in contrast, circulating libraries or rental libraries were for-profit ventures that allowed customers to borrow popular books for a fee. The owners of circulating libraries entertained no illusions of martyrdom in the cause of culture, nor had they any enthusiasm for improving the intellects of their patrons or advancing the educational level of their communities; their one objective was to show a profitable return of their investments." 9
Whether intended for education, recreation, or profit, the existence of book boats on the Erie Canal seems clear. They existed, and they connected people to books. Whether canal travelers read for leisure or for learning, the mere presence of book boats seems to signal a form of literacy perhaps not expected for the early nineteenth century. As a point of comparison, the ability to sign one's own name as a mark of literacy is estimated to be only 30% for merchant seamen in the United States between 1800 and 1840.10
Perhaps canal readers were mainly wealthy educated travelers such as the German Duke, the Cuban poet, and the Canadian adventurer. Or perhaps they included canal families educating their own children, or members of local communities along the canal seeking their own education or diversion. In all these cases, their needs could be served by the book boats.
The presence of Erie Canal book boats can still spark imaginations today. Lockport native Cynthia Cotten, for example, wrote a children's book about the travels of such a boat along the canal. In her book, The Book Boat's In, she tells the story of a boy discovering a book he wants in a book boat that makes weekly rounds selling books to Erie Canal communities in 1835.11
Knowing about the existence of book boats offers Western New Yorkers an additional way to appreciate the historical importance of the Erie Canal. Much as with modern day bookmobiles, little free libraries, public libraries, independent bookstores, and chain bookstores, these boats connected books to people. Learning about them helps expand our knowledge of the historic gem in our own backyards, the Erie Canal.
http://www.eriecanal.org/book_boats.html