Andrew Carnegie attributed his own success to the reading he did as a boy, and he thought the best way to give everyone the same opportunity was to give every community a library. Today public libraries are so ubiquitous that we forget what a novelty they were in those days, and some communities actually refused Carnegie’s gifts. This caricature makes the reason clear: Carnegie gave the library, but insisted that the community undertake the responsibility for maintaining it. In this drawing, Carnegie is a benevolent but enormous genie whose gift of a library is almost too much for the ordinary citizen to bear.
