Public Library and Other Stories

~ ~ ~

York City Children’s Library made me the writer I am, Kate Atkinson told me. Then she told me about the adult ticket they decided they’d issue her there at the age of six because she was taking out so many books.

She went on to describe how the quite small area in that City Library which was originally the children’s section is the place where all the library’s books are now, that everywhere else is filled with computers or space dedicated to genealogy, and how it’s not called the City Library any more, how now it’s called the York Experience.

Her daughter Helen Clyne interrupted to say that the important thing about the notion of a public library now is that it’s the one place you can just turn up to, a free space, a democratic space where anyone can go and be there with other people, and you don’t need money —

a clean, well-lighted place, Kate said —

whose underlying municipal truth is that it isn’t a shop, Helen said. And you can just go. It’s somewhere you can just be. People of all ages all round you. It doesn’t have to be educational. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’re doing. Young or old. Rich or homeless. It doesn’t matter. You can just go there.

So it’s not about books any more? I said. Or it’s about more than books?

It maybe always was, Helen said.

In that books have always been about people? I said.

Well, of course. But there was a culture that encouraged us, and now it doesn’t exist, Kate said. I bought very few books when the girls were young. We went to the library. And nobody bought books when I was young either. I went to the library.

It was what we did, Helen said. It was a habit, a ritual. You borrowed it, you read it, you brought it back and chose something else, and someone else read whatever you read after and before you. It was communal. That’s what public library means: something communal.