Christopher Howse drinks in the benefits of a volunteer library in a pub.
by: Christopher Howse
The ideal pub has a large proportion of regulars, no amplified music – so it is always quiet enough to talk – barmaids who call everyone "dear", a good fire burning, a plain dining-room upstairs, pub games in the public bar, and a garden. This is not my idea, but George Orwell's, and he was right.
The George and Dragon in Hudswell, on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales, has gone one better by setting up a library, run by volunteers. To tell the truth, the whole pub is run by volunteers, like the village shop in Ambridge and other resorts of countryfolk. They know that life hangs together with a local pub, shop, school, church and library.
Now, there's all the difference between books in a pub, which are good, and drinks in a library, which are bad. It is the difference between praying while you smoke and smoking while you pray.
Tessa Jowell once praised libraries of the kind that "when you walk into them, you do not know whether you are walking into a job centre, an internet cafe, a juice bar or a library". By that thinking, they would also be improved with hostesses and opium pipes. In any case, Miss Jowell is only a distant memory, like last year's holiday stomach upset – or she would be were it not for the cost of the Olympics.
A legacy of debt explains some of the reactions to the news that two thirds of the nation do not venture into a library from one year's end to another. "Aha!" they say. "Close 'em down." The matter is devoured by the debate about "funding", as if all good gifts around us were sent from Whitehall above.
Yet despite Miss Jowell's idea of making them smell like job centres, one third of adults and three quarters of children aged between 11 and 15 do still use libraries. That's impressive. For one thing, it is marvellous that they bring the books back. And if three quarters of children aged 11 to 15 went to the dentist, would the response be to close them down for lack of interest?
Libraries – I mean places with books, not just the internet – are just as important as dentists. For example, I quite like Laurie Lee's writing. Laurie Lee would never have written a word had he not visited the public library on his way home from school. Nor would generations since have read Cider with Rosie had they not found it on the library shelves. That wouldn't be the end of the world; there is much to be said for illiteracy. But the world would be narrower and more brutish.
When it comes to today's libraries, the books are the thing – not internetting. Books are windows into other people's minds. The internet is like a library with some rooms fitted with television, others with music or silly games; other rooms on the internet have real books, but they are too often locked, and usually neglected.
A very bookish person, writing in another newspaper, thinks the big threat is "the sound of a back door being quietly opened to the privatisation of the library service". Privatisation? What does it say down the side of Truro Community Library in big stone letters? "Passmore Edwards Free Library", that's what. John Passmore Edwards left school at 13 to help his father, a carpenter and nurseryman. But he read all the books he could, and later made a fortune out of newspapers. He spent his money by giving Dundee a lifeboat and 24 other places a public library.
Philanthropy works at different levels. Rich men should use money for good. "The man who dies rich, dies disgraced," said Andrew Carnegie, who founded 660 libraries in Britain. Those who are not rich may have time to volunteer. They do not excuse councils that close libraries, any more than the volunteers of the George and Dragon had made the brewers close it. But the rich rich and the time-rich between them can save thousands of people from the blind penury of booklessness.
From: Telegraph
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