I used to feel slightly sorry for friends who attended smarter schools than my little village primary, because they did not know the joys of the mobile library - the extraordinary Tardis-like sensation of entering a truck that became vast with the treasure-trove of books crammed within it.
by: Rowan Pelling
loved escaping lessons for my "turn" to peruse the shelves, breathing in the musty scent of ageing paper in the breathless anticipation that some child at another school in Kent had finally released Alan Garner's thrilling Elidor. And then dawdling back to maths, comparing your choices with those of your friends: Nancy Drew vs Tintin. My introduction to Greek myth came when I plucked Leon Garfield's The God Beneath the Sea from the shelf, drawn by Charles Keepings's mesmerising illustrations.
A friend of mine recalls her father was so ecstatic when the mobile library visited their village in Essex that he used to say his dream was to stow away behind a book stack and spend the remainder of his days travelling the land in the van, breathing literature and spying on readers.
Rather less romantic, but no less gratifying, were the hours I spent at little Riverhead library, on the edge of Sevenoaks's sprawl. The librarian must have dreaded our visits, as there were five Pelling siblings, and we used to pick the shelves clear of Asterix and Roald Dahl like locusts.
Later, no working days were happier than those I spent in the British Museum's glorious domed reading room, before the whole operation moved to the new British Library, thinking how legendary bottoms, from Rudyard Kipling to Mahatma Gandhi, had polished the seats before me. I don't know a single adult writer who doesn't owe a vast debt to the public library system.
So I rally with cutlass drawn to Neil Gaiman's battle cry to save our libraries from austerity cuts. The Carnegie Medal-winning author said this week that closing libraries "would be stealing from the future to pay for today, which is what got us into the mess we're in now". He's right. No modern society can call itself civilised if it denies free and universal access to works of literature.
One of my favourite book titles of recent years is The Child That Books Built, by Frances Spufford, because it wonderfully encapsulates the fact that for millions the very building blocks of identity are found on bookshelves. One study carried out by American academics, involving 70,000 case studies in 27 countries, found the biggest determining factor in children achieving academic success was not wealth or class, nor parents staying together, but the presence of books in the home.
Since buying books is an unimaginable luxury to those struggling to buy groceries, the only viable route towards improving those children's chances in life is the local lending library. But we all need to support the institution. When user numbers fall and cash-strapped councils have to weigh the claims of libraries against social services, the former can be a soft target unless demand is visibly high. In the spend and splurge years, the middle classes found books were relatively affordable compared to income, particularly when shopping on Amazon, and many people lost the library habit.
A writer friend tells guiltily how she only recently enrolled her teenage daughter at Cambridge's refurbished central library in Lion Yard, and when they carried her books to the check-out desk her daughter assumed they were about to pay – she simply had no concept of the glory of free books.
I, too, have been a reprehensible library slacker in recent years, thus denying my sons the pleasure of communal book worship, not to mention the author visits and bi-weekly "storytime".
Just standing in the library made me remember how no other literary experience makes you feel so acutely you are part of a vast community of book-lovers, self-improvers, unfettered imaginations, armchair travellers and generally like-minded souls. Like countless others, I am the adult libraries built.
From: Telegraph
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