Biblioteca Turriana (Mexico City, 1788): a cathedral chapter's public reading room, eleven years after Paris opened its own

Three churchmen of the Torres family left their joined libraries and 20,000 pesos of silver to the cathedral of Mexico on condition it be opened to the public. The Latin inscription over the first room says what the endowment was for - ad publicam utilitatem. By 1844 it held 12,295 volumes in 88 cases; it opened three hours a day, had one attendant, and the writer who praised it in 1853 printed its defects and a table of European libraries beside it.