Between the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between the British crown and the Māori chiefs of the North Island in 1840 and 1914, New Zealand’s settler population expanded from a few thousand to just over 1 million. In the same period, 769 libraries were founded in the colony. In 1878, there was one library for every 1,529 people. Virtually all these foundations followed the model of the subscription library, much preferred in nineteenth-century colonial society, as it encouraged personal collections to be pooled for communal benefit.

Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen, The Library- A Fragile Hist…, loc. 618