Public Library and Other Stories

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For the past month or so, while I’ve been editing and readying this book, I’ve been asking the friends and the strangers I’ve chanced to meet or spend time with what they think about public libraries — about their history, their importance and the recent spate of closures. Here’s a transcription of one of the earliest responses I had, from Sarah Wood:

This is what I think of when I think of school holidays, me and my friend Lisa cycling at full speed on our bikes and the route is always to the library.

It started before the time they’d let us walk to school by ourselves. But for some reason we were allowed to do this. First it was the branch library. We were eight or nine years old and we went most days. We’d get out our books, cycle home and read them in the garden in one go. It was an independence thing for sure — we went, chose, borrowed, pedalled home, read what we’d got, then went back again, chose again, came home again and read. We’d throw our bikes down outside its doors — I remember that like it was a part of it, and that we didn’t have any money, but that we didn’t need money: here transaction was a whole other thing. There was a scheme where you got points for taking out books and when you’d reached a certain number of points the prize was that you got to help the librarian tidy up the shelves. We all wanted to do that. We read as much as we could so we could win that prize. The librarian was canny.

Then the new library was built, a terribly stylish five-storey building, a giant addition to the borough where we lived. A real frisson came off the place, it still does when I remember it opening. It was cleverly imagined, beautifully designed. Inside the children’s library there was a sunken reading space that went down into the floor, a small-scale amphitheatre where we sat, citizens of thought, books open on our knees. Across from us there was a window into the place where adult readers could go and listen to records on a great big semicircular sofa — the librarian, momentarily transformed into DJ, would put the record on a turntable on the librarian’s desk and the people listening would plug in a set of headphones behind them on the sofa to hear it, music for free.

Art too: this was also the floor where you could borrow paintings and prints; you could take home a work of art to make your own home as stylish and modern as the library. Downstairs was fiction. Above us were the study carrels where the older children did their homework and all the pupils from different schools met and hung out together. It was exciting. It was like the future would be. In fact I got my first Saturday job there, which was the first time I saw the amazing off-floor facilities they had, the modern stacks full of — well, everything.

I can’t tell you what the opening of that library was like where we lived — it was an event. It was a really fantastic moment in my life, in our lives, a moment of real change. The brand new building brought with it the idea that our local history was important — that books were important, but also that we were too, and that where we lived was, that it had a heritage and a future that mattered. There was something very grounded about that beautiful new build. I’m pretty sure that’s why we were allowed to go there, on our bikes by ourselves like we did, so long as we cycled on the pavement there and back and were careful about the traffic.