Public Library and Other Stories

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Eve Lacey spoke to me about the way books carry their histories, and about the new history of public libraries.

She’s the current Library Graduate Trainee at Newnham College Library in Cambridge; she’d previously worked in a public library in one of the local villages, a fairly well-heeled place, though even there, she said, the most vulnerable really need and use the library, the homeless and jobless people, along with a real mixture of all the generations, especially elderly people and young mothers with children. She told me about the pressure on the public library service to move from council funding to volunteer status, about the way the community there has rushed to protect and sustain the library, about the inevitable catch-22 downgrading situation when something shifts from public funding to less or no funding, and about the official council letters that circulated concerning desperate money-saving tactics (‘a 1 per cent reduction in pay would save approximately £1.28 million … therefore a 2.4 per cent reduction the necessary £3 million savings … one day of unpaid leave would save £0.4 million … the withdrawal of pay increments for the year would save approx. £1.4 million … stopping the first day of sick pay could save approx. £0.5 million and stopping the first two days £0.8 million’).

She told me about the unbelievable length of the queue of excited local children taking part in the Summer Reading Challenge there, a literacy-encouraging initiative where a child reads a book a week then comes back and tells the librarian about the book; she said the line of children wanting to talk about the books they’d read stretched out the door.

She told me about why the Rare Books Rooms in libraries keep books at a certain temperature — because the leather which binds early books is always trying to get back to the original shape of the animal whose skin it was, and the temperature regulation keeps it book-shape. She told me that 250 Bibles bound in calf leather generally equalled 250 actual calves. She told me that the gilt on the edges of books has antiseptic properties, being part gold, and dust-repelling properties. Proper gilding cleans itself.

Then she and the Librarian, Debbie Hodder, took me through into the stacks of the college library (a library formed against all the odds in the late 1800s — the women who studied at Cambridge, which didn’t admit women as full members of the University till 1948, weren’t permitted to use or access the University’s books; the library is, more than a century later, one of the best-stocked college libraries in the city). They showed me a lock of Charlotte Brontë’s hair coiled inside a ring, told me the library also happens to hold in its collection a tennis dress of the 1890s which looks like it would be incredibly heavy to wear, and they let me see several books, including one called An Elementary Treatise on Curve Tracing, by Percival Frost (1892), which begins: In order to understand this work on the tracing of curves whose equations are given in Cartesian coordinates, all that is required of the student is that he shall know the ordinary rules of Algebra as far as the Binomial theorem, the fundamental theorems of the Theory of Equations, and the general methods employed in Algebraic Geometry.

Inside the front cover of this book there are a couple of pasted-in notices. On the left-hand inside page, the notice reads:

1917

BRITISH PRISONERS

INTERNED ABROAD

This book is the gift of Miss M. Fletcher

Newnham College Cambridge

and is supplied through the Agency

at the Board of Education

Whitehall London S. W.

On the right-hand inside page, the pasted-in note says in clear handwriting:

If this book is ever returned,

it will be gratefully received,

though not expected.

M. Fletcher, Librarian

Newn: Coll: Cambridge

Jan 1917.

Underneath that, it says, in the same hand:

Returned May 13, 1919.