Libraries need support to rekindle the magic ...
IDISCOVERED my first public library when I was 12. It was in a converted Victorian mansion in a tree lined garden in Timperley, where I grew up. It was packed with shelves of adventure and the best bit was that I could take home the books for free.
Author Saul Bellow said: “People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”
This was heaven. The place where I met Biggles and The Famous Five. Then came the cream on top. I found my school had its own library and I confess taking into protective custody a copy of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, my favourite childhood book, which I read so many times I never got round to returning. This year I gave it to my seven-year-old grand-daughter for safe keeping.
Sadly, the amazing institution of the public library has been under threat for years. A 2016 BBC report said 343 libraries, including 132 mobile services, had closed in the previous six years, and more were in danger.
Others have been handed over to be run by volunteer groups. As money has got tighter, spending on libraries and the arts has suffered. Could more community volunteer involvement be part of the answer at keeping our libraries open?
Any place where books are stacked is fascinating to me: bookshops or libraries. My only regret about such a visit was when I found, in a second hand bookshop in the Somerset village of Dulverton many years ago, a work that had analysed all major novels of literature and Shakespeare’s plays and reduced them to basic plot lines, twists and characters.
As I had just been published for
the first time, I saw this as a legitimate tax-deductible purchase that meant I would always have a go-to safety deposit box of ideas if my brain ever went numb. Before I could buy it, my chum Alex Kersey-Brown, with whom we were staying, crashed into the dust mote interior, grabbed me and said: “The ladies are in the pub and there is sticky toffee pudding on the menu.”
Sticky toffee pudding, for some reason, was a holy grail after which AKB searched wherever we went. He dragged me away and I never got the opportunity that day to return and make the purchase. I researched, and half wrote in longhand, my first two novels in Huddersfield Reference Library with the help of some brilliant staff. They took a year each to complete. The first was never published but got me an agent and the second was sold within a month of being offered. Would I have managed it without the ambient support of that place?
JK Rowling: “When in doubt go to the library.” I’m happy to say my
It is tragic that libraries remain under threat in these difficult and changing times and they deserve our
support
grand-children are delighted to have libraries in the villages where they live and use them weekly.
Libraries have adapted to e-books and talking books. They stock film and music. They hold community events. But I still get a frisson of excitement and awe when I enter any library and contemplate those shelves of mystery, ideas and adventure. It is tragic they remain under threat in these difficult and changing times and they deserve our continuing support.
A particularly pertinent quote I found was one from children’s author Cornelia Funke: “If I was a book I would be a library book, so I could be taken home by all sorts of different kids.”
A wonderful thought. Is it too late to return Swallows and Amazons?