by Anita Anand
Yet for authors as well, libraries are invaluable. Unless it’s a bestseller, the average hardback is likely to remain on bookstore shelves for about six weeks. With luck, perhaps a year later the paperback version will hit the stands; nevertheless, all but the most commercially successful paperbacks soon disappear as well. Without permanent acquisition by libraries, the fruit of many years’ work simply vanishes from the cultural canon.
Publishers are increasingly resistant to keeping backlists in print. Since my seventh novel has (for once) sold pretty well, I am often approached by readers asking where they can buy the other six. Save one, they are all out of print, and flat-out unavailable at Waterstones. Though I sometimes direct punters to the internet, the cost of the few remaining copies of my older novels on Amazon is now soaring into hundreds of pounds per volume. Where are you most likely to find my previous titles, and at no cost whatsoever? The library. In fact, it is increasingly the case that a library is the only place you can find those books, no matter how rich you are, and many other authors’ fine, but perhaps not Da Vinci Code popular, books as well.
As a writer, I’ve also been able to avail myself of the extended services that contemporary libraries offer, including personal appearances that put me in touch with my readership and they with me. Library-sponsored book groups have fostered reading in general, which is great for writers.
So I owe libraries a debt – one that I hope someday to repay.
A little observed knock-on effect of Europe’s low birth rate is that many people like me, who’ve had no children, will have no kids to whom to pass on their accumulated wealth when they die. I’m just old enough to start feeling a little weird about what happens to the property if, say, I buy a house. When I kick the bucket, does David Cameron move in? With so many childless couples in my generation and the ones behind me, I predict that in about twenty-five years a wave of charitable giving will start pouring into non-profit coffers from dead old people with no kids – along with massive state confiscation of orphaned assets when folks with neither children nor foresight die intestate.
Well, I’m not about to leave my worldly chattel to Dave, or whatever wasteful, avaricious bureaucrat replaces him, just to fund another catastrophic fiasco like Iraq. At the same time, I appreciate how hard it is to give away money well. I have four cousins whose lives have been virtually ruined by trust funds. I’ve lived in Africa, and witnessed firsthand how perversely destructive aid hand-outs can be; they skew local economies, feed government corruption, and undermine individual initiative. With shockingly high frequency, throwing money at people backfires.
So I’ve wracked my brains for somewhere to will my assets, using the physician’s guideline, First, do no harm. I’m not about to repeat the mistake of my great-grandfather-by-marriage, and wreck the lives of my nieces and nephews with money that they didn’t earn. After spending that year in Nairobi, I cannot conscionably support organisations that give aid to Africa, however well intentioned they may be. Then it hit me. Not only would the idea naturally suit a lifelong reader and writer, but what could possibly go wrong with a gift to libraries? How could you spoil anyone’s life because they had access to free books? Or, to be more up to date, because they had access to the internet and computers, or were able to borrow CDs and DVDs for a pittance?
I am bequeathing whatever modest estate I accumulate by my death to the Belfast Library Board. For many penurious years, the little library on the Lisburn Road kept me reading wonderful books at a time that I couldn’t afford to buy them. Often one of the first institutions to suffer cutbacks when public monies run short, libraries these days are woefully underfunded. So if by any chance I kick off a trend among the aging ‘childfree’, brilliant.
Meantime, just try sauntering into a WHSmith, shoving several books from the shelves into your rucksack, and waltzing past security with a promise that you’ll bring them back.
HAVE YOU HEARD OF OSCAR WILDE?
STEPHEN FRY
I grew up in the country, deep in the country. The nearest major library was a twelve-mile bicycle ride into the city of Norwich. I was lucky to live in a house filled with books and to have parents who loved to read, but by the time I approached teenage my appetite for reading, combined with my more or less chronic insomnia, meant that I needed more, far more books to consume daily. Every other Thursday, a mobile library (in the form of a large grey pantechnicon that would today look absurdly old-fashioned) would come along and park not five minutes’ walk from our house. This was my lifeline to the outside world. A quaint battleship-grey modem that linked me to the huge past and present that seemed so impossibly far from the lanes of rural Norfolk.
Aged eleven, one Saturday afternoon I sat in front of our little black and white television set (despite the glowering disapproval of my father who thought – quite rightly of course – that television was a vulgar and despicable thing and that no healthy child should watch it, especially during the hours of sunlight) and watched breathless with enthralled disbelief as they screened a film directed by Anthony ‘Puffin’ Asquith. It was called The Importance of Being Earnest and it left me simply boggling with excitement. I had never heard language used in such a way, had never known that the rhythms of a sentence could be so beautiful, that meanings could turn with such wit on the hinge of a ‘but’ or an ‘unless’ – in short I had never known that writing could do more than tell a story, that it could excite in the way that music does. I remembered whole lines of dialogue and repeated them: phrases like ‘I hope, Cecily, I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection’ and ‘some aunts are tall, some aunts are not tall. That is a matter that surely an aunt may be allowed to decide for herself.’ I hugged these to me as I watched the credits roll by and memorised a name.
The following Thursday I ran to the corner of the lane and threw myself inside the mobile library the moment the door at the rear had opened and the steps been let down. ‘Have you heard of Oscar Wilde?’ I squealed to the cardiganed librarian within who clutched her beads in alarm at the urgency and intensity of my attack. ‘Goodness me, young man …’ ‘Do you have a play he wrote called The Importance of Being Earnest?’ ‘Well now …’ ‘Please, I have to read it!’After what seemed an age we found a copy which was duly stamped. I ran home and up the stairs and into my bedroom.
I read The Importance of Being Earnest three or four times a day every day for two weeks. Then I returned it. I knew the whole play off by heart and can still distress companions with long quotations from it. ‘What else do you have by Oscar Wilde?’ I wanted to know. It was a different librarian and she found me a copy of the Complete Works.
Two weeks later I was back to have it restamped. I had read it from cover to cover, but I wanted to read it all again and again.
Another Library Thursday came and I reluctantly returned the Complete Works and asked if there was anything else by Oscar Wilde I could read. ‘The Complete Works means the complete works,’ the librarian explained. ‘Oh but there must be something else …’ The librarian gave a sigh and then looked me up and down. ‘I’m not sure … but there is …’ ‘Yes? Yes?’ She walked along the central corridor of the van and stooped low in the biography section … her face was flushed as she straightened and placed a book uncertainly into my hands. ‘I really don’t know if … how old are you, young man?’ ‘Thirteen,’ I lied. It was an age that seemed impossibly mature. ‘Well …’ The book was called The Trials of Oscar Wilde and was written by someone called H. Montgomery Hyde.
I took it home and read it. It was a book that changed my life. The heroic lord of language who had captivated me so entirely turned out to have had a secret life. And the more I read the faster my heart beat. For I knew that I shared the same secret. I had never quite dared tell myself this truth but reading of Wilde’s arrest and trial I could not but know it to be true.
It was shattering, terrible, liberating,
stimulating, appalling, wonderful and incredible all at once.
The mobile library a fortnight later had nothing more to offer so the following morning I caught a little motor coach early in the morning and went to Norwich. There in Esperanto Way stood the city’s great library, since burned in a fire and replaced by a fine new one complete with cafés and all kinds of modern excitements.
It was here that I discovered how one book could lead one to another. Bibiliographies and footnotes suggested new names, new books, new writers, whole new areas to be discovered. It was an analogue, card-indexed way of mouse-clicking from one link to another. A little more laborious perhaps, but breathlessly exciting.
Over the next few years the trial and trail of Oscar had led me to read Gide and Genet, Auden and Orton, Norman Douglas and Ronald Firbank. Unforgettable, transformative books for me were that same H. Montgomery Hyde’s The Other Love, Roger Peyrefitte’s The Exile of Capri and Special Friendships, Angus Stewart’s Sandel and Michael Campbell’s Lord Dismiss Us. I read of man-love, boy-love and free love. I clutched to myself the dark secrets of the infamous Book 13 of the Greek Anthology and the Venice letters in Quest for Corvo. I read Cuthbert Worsley’s Flannelled Fool and Robin Maugham’s Escape from the Shadows. From over the Atlantic I encountered Gore Vidal and John Rechy. I discovered the Tangier set, by way of Michael Davies, Paul Bowles, William Burroughs and dozens of others.
For a gay youth growing up in the early ’70s a library was a way of showing that I was not alone. There was an element of titillation and breath-taking possibility, even the chance of a fumbled encounter, but there was vindication too. Some of the best, finest, truest, cleverest minds that ever held a pen in their hands had been like me.
It was almost a side-effect that this caused me to educate myself to a degree which was beyond anything a school could hope to achieve. My own appetite for knowledge and reading and connection had led me, and that is how education works, not by spoon-feeding, but by stimulating the appetite so that children cannot wait to feed themselves. Between the ages of twelve and fourteen I read hundreds and hundreds of books, but more importantly I became unafraid of reading. Great Writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because they opened windows in the mind, they put their arms round you and showed you things you always knew but never dared to believe. Even if their names were terrifyingly foreign and intellectual-sounding, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire or Cavafy, they turned out to be charming and wonderful and quite unalarming after all. Late Henry James was a struggle, I will confess, and some of the longer sentences in Proust would lose me entirely, but all in all, by the time I was fourteen I knew that being gay was a kind of dark blessing, an awful privilege and I knew that, as Oscar once wrote on a photograph to an admirer, ‘The secret of life is in art.’
Without libraries none of this would have been possible. They are still to me places of incredible glamour, possibility, power, excitement and pleasure. Of course the worldwide web and the wonders of the digital age, as well as advances in social understanding, decency and common sense make it less likely that a gay teenager need ever grow up feeling alone, but the downside to that huge advance is that that same teenager may never be led to those magical municipal labyrinths whose shelves contain so much and the existence of which for the better part of two hundred years has so immeasurably improved the quality of so many millions of ordinary lives.
THE SECRET LIFE OF LIBRARIES
BELLA BATHURST
You can tell a lot about people from the kinds of books they steal. Every year, the public library service brings out a new batch of statistics on their most pilfered novelists – Martina Cole, James Patterson, Jacqueline Wilson, J.K. Rowling. But in practice, different parts of Britain favour different books. Worksop likes antiques guides and hip-hop biographies. Brent prefers books on accountancy and nursing, or the driving theory test. Swansea gets through a lot of copies of the UK Citizenship Test. Liverpool prizes Arnold Schwarzenegger’s thoughts on bodybuilding. In Barnsley, it’s MIG welding and tattoos (‘I’ve still no idea what MIG welding is,’ says Ian Stringer, retired mobile librarian for the area. ‘The books always got taken before I could find out.’) And Marylebone Library in London has achieved a rare equality. Their most stolen items are the Jewish Chronicle, Arabic newspapers and the Bible.
But the figures show something else as well – that amongst all communities and in all parts of Britain, our old passion for self-improvement remains vivid. Unlike DVDs or CDs or Xbox games, books removed from public libraries have no resale value. Unless they’re very rare or very specialist, even hardbacks aren’t worth anything any more. So the only reason to take books is to read them.
Even so, theft remains a sensitive subject. ‘If someone suggested the idea of public libraries now, they’d be considered insane,’ says Peter Collins, Library Services Manager in Worksop. ‘Because libraries are based on trust. I mean, if you said you were going to take a little bit of money from every taxpayer, buy a whole load of books and music and games, stick them on a shelf and tell everyone, ‘These are yours to borrow and all you’ve got to do is bring them back,’ they’d be laughed out of government.’ But theft – or loss, or forgetting – is not a new thing. During the 1930s, supposedly a far more upright age, 8.8 million books vanished from the library system every year. Some areas made an industry of it. In Edinburgh during the ’60s and ’70s, handfuls of books used to be hurled out of the Central Library windows into waiting vans every time there was a fire alarm, and the railway staff at nearby Waverley station once rang the library to say they’d found a whole carriage-load of stolen stock.
In Worksop, Peter Collins radiates passion for his job, a love both of libraries and for the infinite variety of people who use them. He’s thirty-three and ‘always defined myself by being a librarian. I’d say to girls, ‘Guess what I do for a living?!’ Admittedly, they were the kind of girls who might be impressed by an MA in librarianship, but I was just so proud of it, so in love with what I did. When I first met my future wife, she got a tirade about the magic of libraries.’
Which doesn’t quite conform to the old image of librarians as diffident, mole-eyed Philip Larkin types, or of disappointed spinsters with limited social skills who spent their time blacking out the racing pages and censoring Page 3. A list of books once considered morally suspect by librarians in the US includes Catch-22, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, Wuthering Heights, 1984, Brave New World and Moby Dick. ‘In the ’60s before the Lady Chatterley trial’, says Ian Stringer, ‘you used to get block books – literally, wooden blocks in place of any books the librarians thought were a bit risque, like Last Exit to Brooklyn. You had to bring the block to the counter and then they’d give you the book from under the desk. So of course you got a certain type of person just going round looking for the wooden blocks.’
Many libraries now recruit from the private sector – from retail, marketing or customer-service backgrounds. Librarians are still supposed to be people who love books but the new idea is that they quite like people too, and don’t mind dealing with some of society’s more ‘challenging’ individuals. Clearly, no genuine misanthrope would last for long in a profession which now spends much of its time helping adults with basic literacy skills, stopping drug use in the toilets, or providing creche facilities for toddlers.
There are 4,500 public libraries in Britain as well as almost a thousand national and academic libraries. As part of its programme of cuts, the coalition government wants to close around 500 public libraries around the country. Librarians – traditionally seen as a mild, herbivorous breed – are up in arms. Partly because public libraries are often seen as a soft target, partly because they say the government consistently undervalues the breadth of what they do, and partly because the cutting will be done during a recession, which is e
xactly when everyone starts going to the library again.
Some sense of the emotional value is given by the writer Mavis Cheek, who ran workshops within both Holloway and Earlstoke prisons. At Earlstoke, she had groups of eight men who ‘may or may not have done unspeakable things’, but who enjoyed the freedom of the writing groups so much they ended up breaking into the prison library when they found it shut one day, risking the withdrawal of their privileges in order to do so. Which authors did the prisoners like most? ‘Graham Greene,’ says Cheek. ‘All that adventure and penance. His stuff moves fast, it’s written very sparely, and it’s direct.’
Greene might seem a surprising choice, but then what people choose to read in extremis often is. Within the first six months of the Second World War, library issues across Britain had risen by 20 per cent, and in some areas by 50 per cent. Evacuees and women whose sons or husbands were away fighting – people, in other words, who had the strongest need to see the world otherwise – were amongst their keenest users. In London, some authorities established small libraries in airraid shelters. The unused Tube station at Bethnal Green had a library of 4,000 volumes and a nightly clientele of 6,000 people. And what those wartime readers chose were not practical how-to manuals on sewing or home repairs, but philosophy. Plato and his Republic experienced a sudden surge in popularity, as did Schopenhauer, Bertrand Russell, Bunyan and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Meanwhile on the battlefront itself, soldiers sought adventure. During the First World War a war library was established to supply over 1,800 hospitals at home and abroad with the works of Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Ian Stringer worked in Barnsley after the 1980s miners’ strike. ‘Barnsley hated Scargill. I mean, really hated him. Because he was their man, he was from Barnsley, they’d supported him, and he’d lost them the just cause. So all the mining jobs had gone and then all the auxiliary jobs like shops and engineering companies making machinery for the collieries had gone, and there was nothing for people any more, nothing at all. Library issues doubled during the strike, they were the highest they’ve ever been. A lot of ex-miners wanted books on law because they wanted to challenge the legality of what the government was doing. Or they needed practical self-help stuff like books on growing your own, or just pure escapism.’
