The accusation against the lending library only surfaced after book production took a turn for the worse. Here, people fail to consider that transformations in the area of social relations have had a far-reaching impact on the sales of novels.
Let us emphasize just two factors.
Austria used to be the El Dorado for the German fiction publisher. Until the year 1848, Austria’s nobility was among the wealthiest. In the summer, Austrian aristocrats resided on their country estates; in the winter, they lived in the capital, close to the court. We always found them to have a vivid interest in literature, but we only seldom saw them in the lending library.
After the abolition of the corveé* and the tithe, however, their incomes decreased dramatically. Today you rarely see aristocrats on their estates, where the monotony of life had once prompted them to read in the past. Their estates are now largely in the hands of leaseholders or the plutocracy; the nobles themselves travel or visit spas during the summer; in the winter, they also spend less time in the capital than they did in the past, since residency at court has become less steady because of the division of the empire. That the aristocracy no longer has a steady domicile, as it did in the past, and that its income has decreased are the reasons why nobles are gravitating toward lending libraries and shying away from purchasing books on a regular basis.
The second decisive factor was the crash of 1873. What happened here was a complete change in the distribution of capital property. The prosperous, rich bourgeois who belonged to the best of book buyers was caught in a situation that forced him to relinquish his proclivity; his domestic libraries gradually went to the second-hand bookseller. In those circles to which capital has migrated, however, we do encounter the most active interest in literature, music, theater, and art, but not the kind of delight in a book that would generate the wish to own it.
Now people want everything. They visit every art exhibition, would not miss any première, any concert, and they sail through any new literary publication indiscriminately. They live everywhere, just not in the quiet of their house; so what good is a private library? It is enough to have a few fine specimens on tables in salons and some classic works with magnificent covers on the bookshelf. The feverish striving to know everything – even if only superficially – leads [them] to the lending library, which was the province of this class all along.
* Unpaid peasant labor.
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