Found this interesting set of statistics:

[shraby]

The library at the time stocked books in at least 5 different languages as English would be included in the list without being separately enumerated.

Library Circulation statistics for week ending August 10: General 4,
Philosophy 4, Sociology 3, Natural Science 8, Useful Arts 7, Fine Arts 4,
History 6, Travel 7, Biography 3, Literature 481. Total 527. Of these
44 were German, 2 Polish, 9 Bohemian and 9 Norwegian. Daily average was
87.
Manitowoc Daily Herald, August 12, 1901

[Jackpine Radical]

1. Fascinating.

At that time, Wisconsin had the highest proportion of foreign-born residents in the continental US. Which is one of the reasons why we were the most socialist state.

[Igel]

2. Sounds about right.

Probably understates the Polish population. Not generally as literate as Germans at the time. And some of those would have been Jews. Even then, most of the library was English.

My local library in Baltimore County when I was a kid had a Spanish section. This was in the '70s in an area where I wasn't aware there were any Spanish speakers. Scattered, perhaps, and older? None in my high school.

The Enoch Pratt library in Baltimore was amazing. It didn't just have "sections," but entire rooms for specific languages, and not a few at that. Every population to pass through Baltimore had left its mark on that library's collections, from English to Armenian.

In Oregon, the library was essentially monolingual. There might be some books in other languages but they were generally "readers" and in the foreign language part of the stacks (480s, IIRC, in with grammars, dictionaries, linguistic histories). There was no "Spanish section."

Every place I move to has a different set of subpopulations. One had a fairly large East Asian section, with separate areas in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. The last public library I spent any time in had a Spanish section, but also Chinese and Vietnamese sections--there was another, but I forget what it was. Something even less "standard" ... Turkish? Tagalog? Indonesian? Roman alphabet, but definitely not Indo-European.