A quantitative survey of the literature pertaining to the study of public libraries, covering the period of 1986-2005, was pursued applying bibliometric methods. The survey aimed at the arrival of descriptive data that would inform about the features and development of the field’s base literature. It was found that the monographic form of cited references was more common than cited references of the journal form, but over time, the tendency to cite articles published in journals increased on behalf of monographs. In addition, the intellectual import from other fields than Library and Information Science was approximated and found more than marginal. On different levels of citation aggregations, frequency distributions and rank orders indicated a fragmented base literature. Cores of the more cited authors and journals were identified and illustrated by bibliometric mapping techniques. The exploration of a presumed shared intellectual focus on the earlier literature showed that approximately half of all papers were isolated in terms of not sharing references with any other paper, though a weak tendency of increased consensus was noted. Finally, though somewhat more than half of all citations were more than five years old, a tendency over time to cite more current literature was notable.