Margaret A. Edwards

In 1932, Margaret Edwards was hired by Joseph L. Wheeler, director of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland, to begin training as a librarian's assistant. At that time, library services for young adults were already taking root in other parts of the country, with women like Jean Roos and Mabel Williams heading up the movement.[4] At Enoch Pratt, Edwards's first position, under the direct supervision of Pauline McCauley, involved handling the small collection of young adult fiction tucked away at the back of the Popular materials section. It was there she realized that she needed to have a better knowledge of literature herself if she wanted to cultivate the minds of young people, and she began to read avidly.[5] As she began to develop herself as a reader, she built upon the existing collection of young adult titles and, by 1940, she had established YA sections in each of the library's branches with the assistance of input from high school students who frequented the library.[3]

Edwards was equally devoted to the betterment of the service provided by librarians to young adults and to the organization of the collections. She felt that to be an adequate YA librarian, one “must read widely and constantly to be able to recommend with assurance books for the slow, the gifted, those with special interests and those with no interests.”[6] Thus, she established a training regimen in which all of her assistants were required to read ten titles from Books for the Teen Age, a list put together by the New York Public Library. Once the initial picks were completed, there would be individual conferences in which the selections were discussed and an assignment of ten more would be implemented. The cycle would repeat until the assistant had read a number of books that satisfied her standards.[7]

Edwards was determined to instill in young people the “importance of their public library, its reading resources, and the approachability of its staff.”[8] One way of doing so was to take her work outside the library and into the schools, using “book talks” as a means of relaying the message to high school students. Though she did not invent book talks, she and other young adult staff members tailored them so as to provide each class of students they visited with lists, called Speaking Books, and allowed students to ask questions and openly discuss titles from the list.[9] Though she encountered several obstacles, foremost among them actually being allowed into the schools, her persistence paid off. The book talks were largely successful over the course of time until both public and private schools all over Baltimore were requesting and receiving book talks.[10]

Beginning in the summer of 1943, Margaret Edwards endeavored to bring books to the masses by creating her own version of a book mobile. She packed up a horse-drawn cart with books from the library, and drove the cart to the economically depressed areas of Baltimore. The book wagon was an instant success. She found that those who frequented the cart had an interest in books, especially books that could be applied to facets of their everyday lives, but might not otherwise partake in the services offered by a brick and mortar library because they had neither the time nor inclination to get to one.[11] Edwards continued running the book wagon during summers until 1945.

Along with her work at Enoch Pratt, Margaret Edwards was actively involved with the American Library Association. She took her first position as the Secretary of the Young People's Reading Roundtable of the ALA in 1935 and would be named its chairperson in 1940.[10] She also participated in several committees, including serving as chairperson to the BookList committee in 1938 and 1948 and becoming a member of the ALA Committee on Standards for Work with Young Adults in Public Libraries in 1960.[10]