In a recent work on Mormon origins, it was again suggested that Joseph Smith may have derived some of his religious and theological ideas from the old Manchester Rental Library, a circulating library located within five miles of the Smith family farm. This claim has received wide circulation, but it has never really received the serious critical considera­tion it merits. This paper attempts to assess the Manchester Library—its origin, content, current disposition, and possible usefulness to Joseph Smith and others prior to the organization of the Church in 1830.

The Manchester Library was organized around 1812 and was origi­nally called the “Farmington Library,” since at this early time the village of Manchester, as an unincorporated entity, had not been formed. (Thus, in 1820 the Smith farm was located in Farmington Township, not Manches­ter, a minor point which occasionally still causes some confusion.) The actual date of the library’s formation, however, has been obscured by con­flicting information. In 1964 Vivian Pratt, wife of Dr. John H. Pratt, the last private owner of the library, believed that the library had been formed “about 1812.” Much earlier, in 1911, Dr. Pratt had written that the library was started in 1814. However, in an interview with Brigham Young Uni­versity Professor M. Wilford Poulson in August 1932, Dr. Pratt indicated that the founding date was 1815. Surviving court records of Ontario County establish that the formal organization occurred on January 1817. The earliest entry in the “Secretary’s Record Book” of the library for the year 1817 suggests an even earlier formation date. Subsequent entries sub­stantiate this view. Most likely, therefore, the Manchester Library was orga­nized—at least loosely—as a lending institution no earlier than 1812, but more probably around 1815 or 1816.

As initially conceived, the Manchester Library was intended to be a self-sustaining enterprise: a thousand shares of stock were authorized to be issued at two dollars each, allowing full membership in one of the region’s first circulating libraries. In addition, yearly membership dues of twenty-five cents and fines for damaged or overdue books provided revenues from which additional books were purchased. The Manchester Library eventu­ally gained a wide reputation as a good circulating library. In 1832, for instance, nearly twenty years after its founding, a separate “Librarian’s Record Book” was started for those patrons who lived in Canandaigua, the county seat, eight miles south of Manchester.

As stated in the Preamble of the “Constitution of the Farmington Library kept on Manchester,” the purpose of the library was strictly liter­ary. The constitution stipulated the nature of the society, election of offi­cers, qualifications for membership, convening of meetings to conduct business (annually on the second Tuesday in January), and book lending practices and fines. The articles were followed by a list of names, which eventually grew to include seventy-six members, many of whom were prominent in the development of Ontario County. The most important institutional member of the society was the librarian, whose duty it was to insure the regular and orderly use of the library, collect fines, and supervise the de facto purchasing of books. Except for the first years of the library’s existence, when Addison N. Buck was installed by ballot as librarian, John Pratt from 1818 until his death in 1865 served continuously as the society’s librarian. The library itself was kept in Pratt’s Manchester home, and it remained in the hands of the Pratt family for four generations. In 1943–44, upon the death of John H. Pratt, M.D., 222 of the original Manchester Library books were donated by his widow to the Ontario County Histori­cal Society in Canandaigua, New York.

Eventually the library grew to at least 421 books, of which 275 were actually purchased in, or before, 1830. An examination of these reveals much concerning the kinds of books available to the expanding region of western New York as well as those which were found to be particularly pop­ular and useful among library patrons. The library contained a wide range of books readily available in the area: literature (58), history (42), religion (33), biography (24), adventure and exploration (16), science (natural phi­losophy and natural history) (15), philosophy (moral and political) (11), reference (“how-to” books and advice) (11), military events (10), anthro­pology (9), and geography (7).

While most of the books were not directly relevant to emerging themes within either the new church or its growing literature, it has been suggested that several of the books dealt with material which directly, or at the least implicitly, formed the intellectual material from which Joseph borrowed his doctrines.8 Themes discussed in some of these books and those devel­oped by Joseph Smith (which eventually were expressed in the religion and theology of the new church) include American antiquities, the Hebraic origin of the Indians, the plurality of worlds, South American geogra­phy, missionary efforts among the American Indians, and early Christian developments.

For example, Josiah Priest’s The Wonders of Nature and Providence Dis­played (1825) contains a potpourri of topics ranging from natural history and philosophy to religion and literature. This work includes a verbatim extract of all the salient arguments of Ethan Smith’s thesis of the Hebraic origin of the American Indians presented in the first edition of his View of the Hebrews (1823). The Priest volume had already begun to circulate among Manchester Library patrons by late 1836.

The concept of multiple world systems and of inhabitants in celestial orbs, in both time and space, was thoroughly discussed on two Manchester Library volumes by Thomas Dick, one of the most prolific advocates of the pluralist doctrine. His Philosophy of a Future State (1829) and The Christ­ian Philosopher (1823) deal extensively with the notion that the universe is fully peopled both for the glory of God and for the pleasure of man. These volumes did not begin to circulate, however, until early 1830. Brief extracts from Dick’s Future State later appeared in the Latter-day Saint Messenger and Advocate of December 1836.

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The first serious, sustained treatment of the question whether the Manchester Library might have provided significant literary material to Joseph Smith was made by M. Wilford Poulson, professor of psychology at Brigham Young University from 1910 to 1966 and a major Mormon and Western Americana book and manuscript collector and dealer.12 Poulsen’s own interest in Mormon Americana was stimulated by a variety of factors, but particularly by the publication of a psychological study of Joseph Smith and the origins of the Book of Mormon undertaken by Dr. Walter F. Prince, executive research officer of the Psychic Research society in Boston. Beginning about 1929, Poulson embarked upon a tireless search for pub­lished and unpublished materials relating to Mormon origins. Except for a very small circle of confidants, few knew at the time what Poulson had undertaken, and still fewer realized that by 1942 Poulson had managed to reconstruct the entire Manchester Library as it probably existed in the first half of the nineteenth century. Among his many prized possessions were two of the original Manchester Library volumes, William Jay’s Short Dis­courses (1812) and the Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs (1811), both of which he acquired from Dr. John Pratt during a 1932 trip to eastern libraries and Church sites.

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Even though Joseph Smith and others involved in the early years of the Restoration could have had access to the Manchester Library (insofar as anyone who paid the necessary membership fees could participate fully in the activities of the library), none of the principal individuals—including Joseph—became a member nor made direct use of its resources. None of the library’s secretary books, of which there are three extant at the Ontario County Historical Society, lists any patron who affiliated himself with the new church. Moreover, if Joseph had wished to explore the literary mate­rials of the day, it would have been unnecessary to travel the five miles to Manchester when in Palmyra, only two miles distant, there were several book-stores and at least one library, the contents of which he would have been free to peruse.

Timothy C. Strong, owner and editor of the Palmyra Register (1817–21) announced the opening of a bookstore in December 1817 located in his Palmyra printing office. In May 1818, he announced he had received a new selection of books. And in September 1818, about 250 volumes were advertised by title in his weekly. (Numerous books included in this last shipment were later to be found in the Manchester Library, suggesting that the Manchester Library Society may have acquired many of its early volumes from Strong's Palmyra Bookstore.)

In December 1820, and later in October 1822, other bookstores were opened in Palmyra, one by Leonard Wescott and another by E. F. Marshall, respectively, offering works on science, history, religion, philosophy, medicine, and travel. After Pomeroy Tucker and E. B. Grandin purchased Strong's newspaper in 1823, changing its name to the Wayne Sentinel, they opened the Wayne County Bookstore, stocking "a general and well selected assortment of books." (Tucker and Grandin changed the name of their bookstore back to Palmyra Bookstore in 1826.) Shipments of a wide variety of books seemed to arrive regularly about every year or so from 1818 on.

Bookstores were also located in Canandaigua, eight miles south of the Smith farm. Here J. D. Bemis, owner and editor of the Ontario Repository as well as local book printer and publisher, operated the Canandaigua Bookstore, while a rival, H. Tyler, operated the Ontario Bookstore.

As early as 1819, and occasionally thereafter, book auctions were held in Palmyra. In one case, "scores" of books were received from New York City "comprising history, divinity, medicine, law, travels." During the winter of 1822–23, a library was established in Palmyra. Later, in 1828, E. B. Grandin, publisher of the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon, established a circulating library for the public in Palmyra. The availability of bookstores and libraries in Palmyra, together with the fact that the Smith family regularly obtained the Palmyra Register and later the Wayne Sentinel from the newspaper office which doubled as a bookstore, would have mitigated the need to travel nearly three times the distance to acquire literary materials from the Manchester area.

Clearly Joseph Smith had access to a wide range of books in that he lived in proximity to libraries and bookstores. The larger question as to whether he actually made use of these materials, either from libraries and bookstores or from privately owned sources, remains an issue which con­tinues to elude definitive treatment. We can be reasonably certain, how­ever, that young Joseph did not exploit the resources of the Manchester Library. It may be that Joseph’s own educational training, both formal and informal, had not prepared him at this early age to deal with libraries and bookstores generally. It is known, for instance, that Joseph briefly attended schools in Palmyra in 1818 and that he used several elementary textbooks in arithmetic and reading. There is little direct evidence that his literary skills extended much beyond a cursory acquaintance with a few books. As Joseph’s mother, Lucy Mack Smith, wrote in her biography of the Prophet, Joseph was a “remarkably quiet, well-disposed child.” He “seemed much less inclined to the perusal of books than any of the rest of the rest of our children, but far more given to meditation and deep study.”

Joseph Smith eventually did acquire a modest personal library and supported the formation of the Nauvoo Library and Literary Institute, to which he donated many of his own books in 1844. Given his unlettered background, however, it is likely that during the 1820s he simply was not a part of the literary culture, that portion of the population for which books provided a substantial part of its intellectual experiences. If Joseph in fact did not avail himself of published books at this early date, however, there still remains a wide range of literary sources to which he may have had access, such as newspapers, lectures and tracts (both religious and politi­cal), and almanacs. Such sources would certainly be more in keeping with his informal educational background, and that of his frontier neighbors. The existence of these other sources may, in fact, account more directly for Joseph’s probable noninvolvement with the Manchester Library and per­haps most other libraries and bookstores of his region.

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*208 Priest, Josiah, comp. The wonders of nature and Providence, displayed, compiled from authentic sources, both ancient and modern. Albany: J. Priest, 1825.