“The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.” - Carl Sagan, Cosmos
My own book trail often starts at my local public library. I am lucky enough to work five minutes from my own, fantastic city library and you’ll often see me there at lunchtimes, relaxing in the peaceful atmosphere while my colleagues rush around outside in cafe's and shopping malls. I can’t imagine someone who professes to love books, as I do, not also being in love with libraries. Yet many of my reading peers eschew the library in favour of buying books on Amazon or from a local big-chain bookshop (stroke coffeeshop). Don’t get me wrong, I love to delve into the treasures that a bookshop can offer, and the pleasing aroma of coffee blends well with the smell of all those bright, shiny new books with their unbent spines. The scent of a library is another thing altogether. It evokes memories of childhood and a feeling of being on the cusp of something big, new and wonderful. Online or high-street bookshops offer an unparalleled range of books. Not so at your local library, but a lot of skilled people put a lot of hard work into offering a smaller, yet still diverse range of books and other materials to the public. It’s a public service that we must support and in this age of capitalism it is a wonderful thing.
Free Books, Free Space
A library offers so much more than a public lending service that is free at the point of use. The public library is an example of one of our most precious and shrinking assets; public space. Unlike town-squares or parks, the library is somewhere any free citizen can go at any time, out of the elements and once there tap into a wealth of materials, which can expand her horizons or simply entertain.
Why You Shouldn’t Feel Bad
What’s more you are already paying for this service through your taxes. But what about the authours? Much of what I wanted to say about the economics of libraries and how libraries work in tandem with the publishing industry has already been discussed here: If Public Libraries Didn't Exist. In short, without libraries the literary world would be a shallower place and people who make their living from the book industry would be worse off than if libraries didn’t exist.
The One I Want’s On-Loan
Now I’ve already mentioned that the sheer range of books you can buy from a bookshop outclasses the library. I read a lot of books in the fantasy genre and, in case you didn’t know, many fantasy books come in series; trilogies or longer. Many is the time I have been reading the blurb on the back of a library book, like the look of it and decide that it will be my next read when I discover on my way to the checkout-machine that it’s Book Two of The-Wizards-of-Indeterminate-Skill series and Book One is on loan. Nevermind I say, my local library has a great reservation system, in these days of on-demand products and services does it really hurt to wait a couple of weeks? So, what to read in the meantime? That’s what’s great about libraries: they don't exist to sell you books. In a bookshop, books are arranged by category. Category is similar to genre but not the same, a discussion for another post, but category is all about the business of selling. This means that if you go to a bookshop to look for a fantasy novel and don’t find it you’re likely to choose another fantasy novel instead, that is assuming you have the wads of disposible income that always seem to elude me.
A to Z, and Everything In-between
The fiction section in a library is always arranged in A-Z by authour, no categories, and only a little coloured sticker on the spine to tell you the broad genre. I have been exposed to many great books I would otherwise not have read if it weren’t for browsing between the books I’m looking for. The last book I read is a case in point: Mary Renault’s The King Must Die, an how-it-could-have-happened retelling of the Greek myth of Theseus. This fantastic first-person book from the POV of Theseus reads like a 21st-century fantasy novel and yet I discovered about halfway through that it was first published in 1958. What a find, I foresee more of her on the booktrail ahead.
It’s Not All Smelling Of Roses
As far as book-condition goes, what you get at a library is a well-thumbed book that has been handled by who-knows-how-many dirty, sticky, smelly hands. At least, that’s one of the reason’s I get from others as to why they don't like libraries. I think a well-used book has a certain charm, the more broken the spine is, the more popular it’s likely to be, it can also be fun trying to identify that old stain that pops out and surprises you on page 189, or the shopping list someone used as a bookmark that fell out on page 207. I think that nowadays there is a tendency to over-react about hygiene and the war against the germ. In all my years of borrowing books I’ve never so much as caught a cold from an old book. Well, not as far as I know anyway. Perhaps I should look that up in the reference section.
