History of the Town Library
The Memoirs of the House of Bourbon. (Opticks and The Memoirs are still in the library.) By these several means the total steadily rose, as membership did also; by 1864 there were 97 members and about 1,000 separate works in stock (one third of them fiction) and more than twice as many volumes. Many of them had come from the libraries of the Horticultural and Agricultural Societies, bought for the Institution by Stacey Gibson.
In its first years the Institution found homes here and there in the town. It moved to its Reading Room in 1853, premises which were enlarged in the 1880s by the benefaction from the Gibson family that has been described. At that time several hundred volumes a year were being purchased; by 1900 the library possessed more than 20,000 volumes or in other words perhaps half as many separate works. The books also overflowed the shelves available to house them - and until recently they continued to do so. A perennial problem for all serious libraries, it is more acute in Saffron Walden than elsewhere.
The years 1880-1930 were the period of the most rapid growth for the Town Library, with its large stock and
membership linked in a virtuous circle of increase. In 1887 the Library had 147 members (who borrowed 3,000 volumes), and by the 1920s there were 600 members, 10 per cent of the town's population, a large number for a subscription library. The rate-provided County Library, which arrived in Saffron Walden in 1930, gradually sapped numbers from the Town Library, and perhaps television, even in its primitive black-and-white form, weakened it too. At all events declining funds and membership made closure inevitable; the Town Library was brought into close association with the library service of Essex County Council in March 1967.
In 1970, a few years after this new compact, the public library came to occupy part of the Town Library building, just as it had done for some years after it had first arrived in Saffron Walden in 1930. In the 1970s the rooms were very congested, but in 1975 the Corn Exchange was taken over for use by the County Library. It was possible once again to shelve the Town Library books in much of the space they formerly occupied, and to open a small study area near them.
There was some room for further expansion, though a visitor to the Town Library is likely to feel that it has
