Public Library and Other Stories

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Local councils, under the pressure of draconian and politically expedient cuts, don’t like to say that the libraries they’re closing are closing. They say they’re ‘divesting’. They now call what used to be public libraries ‘community libraries’. This is an ameliorating way of saying volunteer-run and volunteer-funded.

Just in the few weeks that I’ve been ordering and re-editing these twelve stories for this book, twenty-eight libraries across the UK have come under threat of closure or passing to volunteers. Fifteen mobile libraries have also come under this same threat. That makes forty-three — in a matter of weeks.

Over the past few years, just in the time it’s taken me to write these stories, library culture has suffered unimaginably. The statistics suggest that by the time this book is published there will be one thousand fewer libraries in the UK than there were at the time I began writing the first of the stories.

This is what Lesley Bryce told me when I asked her about libraries:

The Corstorphine public library was a holy place to me. It was an old building, hushed and dim, like a church, with high windows filtering dusty light on to the massive shelves of books below. And the library had its own rituals: the precious cards (only three each), the agony of choosing, and the stamping of dates. The librarians themselves were fearsome, yet kind, allowing the child me to take out adult books, though not without raised eyebrows. My parents were readers, but we did not have many books in the house, so the library was a gateway to a wider world, a lifeline, an essential resource, a cave of wonder. Without access to the public library as a child, my world would have been smaller, and infinitely less rich. All those riches, freely available, to everyone and anyone with a library card. All children should be so lucky.

There’s a great kids’ library at the end of our street now where we live, in Notting Hill, soon to be sold, along with the adult one, though they claim to be rehousing it nearby.