Librarians worried that Allan’s death, which became a focal point of the scare, would dissuade people from borrowing books and lead to a decline in support for public libraries. The panic sprung from “the public understanding of the causes of diseases as germs,” says Annika Mann, a professor at Arizona State University and author of Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print. “The death of Miss Jessie Allan is doubly sad because of the excellent reputation which her work won for her and the pleasant affection which all librarians who knew her had come to feel for her, and because her death has given rise to a fresh discussion as to the possibility of infection from contagious diseases through library books,” the Library Journal, published by the American Library Association, wrote in October of 1895.Īllan’s death occurred during what is sometimes called the “great book scare.” This scare, now mostly forgotten, was a frantic panic during the late 19th and early 20th centuries that contaminated books-particularly ones lent out from libraries-could spread deadly diseases. She was a librarian at the Omaha Public Library, and thanks to a common fear of the time, people worried that Allan’s terminal illness may have come from a book. Such deaths were a common occurrence at the turn of the 20th century, but Allan’s case of “consumption” reportedly came from an unusual source. On September 12, 1895, a Nebraskan named Jessie Allan died of tuberculosis.
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