Libraries are more than just books, librarians chant, tossing their solitary copy of Buddenbrooks into the skip<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
My observation is that most of the journalists writing these tender-hearted pieces haven\u2019t actually stepped through the door of a public library in years. They are under the general impression that public libraries are still the wonderful intellectual resources of their youth and childhood, though typing the words \u2018libraries are more than just books\u2019 must give even them pause for thought. If books come so far down the list of libraries\u2019 priorities, what\u2019s the point of them? Lots of things could be community hubs \u2013 bus shelters, park benches, the fountains at a shopping centre, the caf\u00e9 at your nearest John Lewis, the toilets at Paddington to the LGBTQIA+ community, bless them. There doesn\u2019t seem to be a lot of point keeping a handsome Victorian building going as a mere drop-in centre.<\/p>\n
As a chronic reader and the son of an old-school librarian, I can say that my belief in libraries is as strong as anyone\u2019s. I went from the children\u2019s library at Old Malden (Enid Blyton\u2019s Find-Outers series) to the one at Sheffield Broomhill, a beautiful building (Billy Bunter, J.P. Martin\u2019s Uncle, Professor Branestawm).<\/p>\n
Then there was the magnificent 1930s Sheffield Central Library, still under the redoubtable thumb of the legendary councillor Enid Hattersley, Roy\u2019s mum. After the setting up of municipal public libraries following an 1850 Act, Sheffield was one of the few to stock fiction at all: librarians have always been quite censorious people and it took most of them decades to come around to the idea that their readers might like to borrow and read novels. Sheffield was always much more liberal, and the fiction shelves were a glorious introduction to the classics as well as newer novels. I borrowed and read most of Nabokov, Conrad, Orwell, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark. Tantalising presences like those charming Scott Moncrieff Proust volumes with the scratchy Philippe Jullian illustrations would have to wait, but exercised an allure over me for years.<\/p>\n
And then my mum sneaked me into Sheffield University Library, with its still more thrilling holdings. By the time I got to Oxford, I knew from the first day what I wanted out of the university. It was the books in the Bodleian. It started with a sight of a line of books, in the middle, one with the words NABOKOV PNIN on the spine. I don\u2019t know why it exerted such a pull on me. That book had been there 20 years before and would be there in 20 years\u2019 time. The sight of the date stamps were magical, too, to me; the idea that someone had read The Man Who Was Thursday, and renewed it repeatedly, the year before I was born, someone I would never know and yet whom I knew, our passion shared.<\/p>\n
There is a recognisable process that has taken place in many formerly great institutions in this country \u2013 newspapers, concerts of classical music and certainly public libraries. First, an efficient and clearly defined service should be identified. In the case of libraries, this meant the making available of a wide range of interesting and good-quality books, the success and popularity of a library being in direct proportion to the number of books it holds. Secondly, the institution\u2019s purpose should be declared inadequate. In this case, the mantra that \u2018libraries are more than just books\u2019 starts being recited as preparation for what is to follow.<\/p>\n
Thirdly, an assault by the administrators themselves on the most valuable resources of the institution. In the case of libraries, this has meant a commitment to the principle of getting rid of as many books as possible. The practice, labelled by librarians as \u2018deaccessioning\u2019 or, repulsively, \u2018weeding the stock\u2019, rests on some untested claims. One, that old books somehow physically disintegrate, was long ago annihilated by that great man Nicholson Baker in a rare polemic against librarians. Another is that users find the mere presence of old books off-putting. Libraries are more than just books, the librarians chant, tossing their solitary copy of Buddenbrooks into the skip.<\/p>\n
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