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The library became the cathedral where I would come to worship and the stories were as precious to me as prayers.
We were naughty together, the library and me. I would show it my membership card and it would show me the world.
Libraries are very special spaces, spaces where people come together in separate but joint pursuits of knowledge, of learning. Libraries are the heartbeats of communities.
A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
The librarian isn’t a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.
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.
The great unsold truth of libraries is that people need them not because they’re about study and solitude, but because they’re about connection. Connection with other worlds and different views, even if that’s no more than being among other people thinking and breathing.
A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination.
A mall – the shops – are places where your money makes the wealthier wealthy. But a library is where the wealthy’s taxes pay for you to become a little more extraordinary instead. A satisfying reversal. A balancing of the power.
A public library is such a potent symbol of a town’s values; each one closed down might as well be 6,000 stickers plastered over every available surface reading: ‘WE CHOOSE TO BECOME MORE STUPID AND DULL’.
