JSTOR Daily: “Visit your local public library today and you may find rows of kids playing computer games, or even a couple of Xboxes. That might seem like evidence that libraries have drifted from a pure focus on the printed word. But, as gaming scholar Scott Nicholson finds, gaming at the library is a tradition that goes back to the 1850s. In mid-nineteenth century Great Britain, the pattern of the industrial workday—solid hours of intense work followed by leisure time—meant many men spent their off-hours gambling and playing games in public houses. Social reformers responded by creating game rooms and billiard parlors at libraries, considered a more respectable setting for recreation. In the United States, meanwhile, the idea of using libraries for recreation—even in the form of recreational reading—was a controversial idea. Some of the founders of the Boston Public Library, which opened in 1854, argued that it was inappropriate to buy popular fiction books. (They ended up losing that debate.) But, Nicholson writes, even then games were part of some U.S. libraries. For one example, the Mechanics’ Institute Library in San Francisco, founded in 1854 to serve the city’s growing population in the gold rush years, housed a chess room from the start. Nicholson notes that the library is the home of the oldest chess club still existing in the U.S.