Wisconsin's Public Libraries Spent $16,816,840 on Print Materials in 2012

You can look it up.

The Whole Booke of Psalmes is expected to fetch somewhere between $15,000,000 and $30,000,000 at auction on Tuesday, November 26.

Credit:  Wikipedia

A Most Expensive Book.  (The New York Times, 11/23/2013)

Excerpt:   More rare and endangered than old books, lately, are bookstores and public libraries. In the United States, more than a thousand bookstores closed between 2000 and 2007. Borders, which owned more than 1,200 bookstores in 2003, shut the doors to the last of them in 2011. Public libraries in nearly every state have suffered budget cuts. [From 2010] Most have reduced hours and services; others have sold off books. Some libraries have merged; others have privatized. Two years ago, the American Library Association issued a task force report called “Keeping Public Libraries Public.” In an age of library downsizing, a nonprofit in Wisconsin makes Little Free Libraries, wooden boxes not much bigger than a mailbox, to put up in neighborhoods, for book swapping. They’re inspired. But they’re not buildings; they’re boxes.