I feel a bit ashamed to mention that yesterday I went out and re-joined my local library after an absence of nearly 10 years. I had been thinking about doing this for a while. Partly because my hopeless lack of self-discipline in the face of bookshop special offers worries me. The undue influence of publishers’ marketing over what I read is a cause for concern – when I can raise my head from my latest book long enough to worry about it. I have found some superb titles like this, not least William Brodrick’s The Sixth Lamentation, that I might otherwise never have come across. But it struck me that it might be nice to make some reading choices based on slightly less commercial and manipulative criteria. Partly because a couple of people that I know said they were going to and, you know how it is, things like that can act as a reinforcement if the same idea was already brewing in your own head.
I’m more familiar with libraries than most, having spent a couple of years working in one – as a humble assistant, I should add, a mere worker bee rather than a glamorous member of the professional staff. (This is a very important distinction in the library world.) That was in the adjoining London borough and it was a job I would have loved were it not for the fact that readers would keep coming in and wanting to borrow the stock. Looking after the books - shelf tidying, ordering reserves and administering their loan, the lovely job of putting those shiny transparent jackets on hardbacks – I could have done this all day, every day. Unfortunately it also involved having to actually serve the reading public and you would not believe the jaundiced view of human nature you acquire when you realise there are people out there who will argue black is white for the sake of avoiding a twenty pence fine or the trouble of returning their books to the branch they actually visited in the first place. So it was a mixed bag. I had a special job which I have never lived down – the task of bawling out the twice-daily announcements that the library was about to close. But the interior of any branch library, somewhere I had already been visiting since the age of five, is a place nearly as familiar to me as my own living room, even if I have never, ever been inside it before.
I can remember very clearly being taken to join the local library for the first time at a branch which has a very good chance of being the most westerly-situated in London. At the counter was someone checking out Hergé’s Tintin adventure Cigars of the Pharoah. I was very interested in this for, you will remember, it has a superbly bright and colourful cover. I had to have it explained to me by my mother in an urgent whisper that it was, in fact, being borrowed by someone else and not particularly suitable for me in any case. This seemed rather unfair to me – it was obviously a picture book – but I was quickly distracted by being led into the children’s section where, right in the centre, was a large box where the picture books were stored. I seem to remember that The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins by Dr Seuss was on my early list of reading material. I had never come across the name Bartholomew before and, although a precocious reader, had no idea how to come to terms with such a word. I could not believe that any real-life child would be cursed with such a ridiculous name. The boys I went to school with were called things like Stephen and Kevin and Darren. In those days there was no plastic membership card and electronic pen to keep track of your borrowings. Each card had a ticket inside and readers were issued with four small wallet-shaped pieces of cardboard – pink for adults and yellow for children. When you borrowed a book one of these was taken from you and the book ticket inserted in it. They were filed away until you returned with the book, which was reunited with its ticket, and your borrowers’ token handed back to you.
And it went on from there through libraries in at least four local authorities, school libraries, sixth-form libraries, university libraries, newspaper libraries. We lived in Norwich when the central library burned to the ground after an unsuspecting cleaner switched on a light and ignited a gas leak. The central library was located right opposite the fire station but there were no appliances at home. Out of the ashes was born the phoenix of The Forum – we wander in every so often when visiting the Fine City and are awed – but I can still remember the old central library vividly, because I spent so much time in there, under many different circumstances. I huffed my way through a Christian rebuttal of Wicca, hatched a detailed business plan in the reference library which has never yet been carried out, revised for my journalism exams and allowed a language course to become so overdue that Mr Random had to take it back and pretend it had been abandoned at our house by a person he had no knowledge of.
When a library assistant I had a special card that entitled me to 20 items at a time, for more or less as long as I wanted, plus anything I wanted to take out on relatives’ tickets. And it ruined me. When I left I could have put my account onto a special ex-staff setting that would have retained these privileges. But I didn’t and I let all my library memberships lapse. I was simply sick of the sight of the place. And it’s taken me quite a while to get over that. But my plan to renew my membership locally was a good one. I walked in and was instantly at home. The staff were helpful and the other readers sufficiently unobtrusive. At present I’m four graphic novels to the good and also equipped with a couple of unusual detective novels that I probably wouldn’t have picked up in the local branch of Borders. Plus, while I was waiting for my application to be processed, I sat down in perfect peace and read The Guardian from cover to cover. I was a happy woman. And all this was completely free. Yes, a good decision.
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