In 1847 the Boston City Council appointed a joint committee on a library. The next year a special act was passed by the Massachusetts State Legislature authorizing the city of Boston to found and maintain a library. Efforts were made to effect a union of interests with the Boston Athenæum, but they failed. In 1849 the first books were presented by the Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, and in the following year J. P. Bigelow, then Mayor of the city, turned over to a library fund the sum of $1,000 which had been presented to him as a personal testimony. Edward Everett presented 1,000 United States documents, and Edward Capen was appointed librarian by the Mayor. George Ticknor, a member of the Board, helped to draw up a preliminary report outlining the ideals for the new civic institution. The library was not to be a “mere resort of professed scholars.” The key note of the whole public library movement in America was struck by Ticknor when in 1851 he wrote of his hopes for the new library proposed for Boston: “I would establish a library which differs from all free libraries yet attempted; I mean one in which any popular books, tending to moral and intellectual improvement, shall be furnished in such numbers of copies that many persons can be reading the same book at the same time; in short, that not only the best books of all sorts, but the pleasant literature of the day, shall be made accessible to the whole people when they most care for it, that is, when it is fresh and new.” A timely friend was found in Joshua Bates, who gave more than $50,000 for the purchase of books, saying that he thought it was desirable to render the public library at once as useful as possible by providing it with a large collection of books in many departments of knowledge. Thus the aim of the founders was quickly realized, it having been their professed intention to make the library what no other library in the world had either attempted or desired to become, “a powerful and direct means for the intellectual and moral advancement of a whole people without distinction of class or condition.” The Boston Public Library was the pioneer of the large public libraries in America and as such has long enjoyed a prominence which in a way has resulted in its differentiation from other large municipal institutions.