The Providence Athenaeum library in Rhode Island is 250 years old, “a vestige of the days when America’s settlers created private lending libraries because public ones had yet to be invented.” But the Athenaeum has often spent more money than it has taken in, and “with a drop in stock market returns, the board decided to sell off the prize of its collection, a complete poster-size folio of Audubon’s ‘Birds of America,’ valued at as much as $7 million. Now the birds are at the center of a raucous battle between the people who run the library and the people who use it.”