“With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.” - Doris Lessing.
As a result of funding cuts by Birmingham City Council, there is now a proposal to reduce the library services budget by up to 40%. This would mean that many beloved local libraries around Birmingham would need to close, staff levels would be reduced, transferring library services to other non-council owned locations and creating an unspecified number of “hub” libraries.
This plan would be an unprecedented disaster for everyone that uses the vitally important services provided by our public libraries, which lie at the heart of our communities.
A campaign called Birmingham Loves Libraries has been formed by members of the public in order to try and overturn this decision and get Birmingham City Council to realise just how important our local libraries are.
To find out how you can get involved, including signing a petition to show your support, visit the link below:
By way of a kind of tribute to my own experience with libraries, I thought it would be interesting to revisit some of my memories through the years.
Those of us of a certain generation will have special memories of those first few visits to our local public lending library. The musky smell of wooden shelves and the old books that sat on them. The muted atmosphere that hit you when you entered, punctuated only by whispered questions to the watchers, the librations, whose eyes seemed to be everywhere, waiting with a ssssshh should a voice be raised too loudly above the silence.
“Where can I find books about Hand gliding?”, or, “Have you got anything about the life cycle of the Dung Beetle.” Endless queries that kept coming through the door, seeking answers from thr know-it-all librarians and the neatly stacked tomes that stood ready to reveal their secrets. All the while in the background, the soft ker-plunk of the date stamp as books were checked out. On and on it went, ker-plunk ker-plunk ker-plunk, like an automated hammer in an industrialised factory. But it wasn’t helping to construct anything, it was instead, freeing books. For twenty eight days they were allowed out into the community under supervision of their lenders.
As kids we were hardly afforded anything for free, except perhaps for the milk we received at school. So imagine the excitement and wonder of going into a library and coming out with a handful of books, of all shapes and sizes that could literally transport you anywhere in space and time. I could travel back to Earth’s distant past, of dinosaurs, volcanoes and cavemen, or zip into a future populated by strange creatures from Mars. This was the hook that pulled some of us into the life long cycle of borrow and return. When you brought back your books there was always something shiny and enticingly new waiting to be brought home.
It was always my mom that took me to the library. Usually as part of a shopping trip to Kingstanding circle, near our home in the north of Birmingham. On the way back we would stop off at Kingstanding Library, and she would head straight to the rotating book stand that housed the Mills And Boon romance books. I don’t know how she managed it, but she would get through around eight of these within a week. Maybe she was employing some kind of speed reading technique in order to get to the juicy bits. She also used to take a peak at the endings first, maybe to get an idea of whether the whole book was worth reading. She would read early in the morning, while cooking and in the afternoon after coming home from work. She must have read the entire collection of Mills and Boon several times over, but I never remember her reading much of anything else.
Meanwhile, I would be in the children’s section, sitting on the big mat, pulling out random spines from one of the huge wooden bookcases that spanned the wall. Worlds would unfurl before my eyes as I opened up these picture books. Fantastical places full of strange new words that I couldn’t even pronounce. I think part of the allure of the library for me was that it seemed like a place of safety. There was something cosy and warm about it, it was a place I could lose myself in and disappear from the world. As a child I was incredibly shy and I felt quite at home within its silent atmosphere, where there was no pressure to speak or be heard.
By the time I started at the big comprehensive school, I was a seasoned regular of the library. Books of all kinds had come home with me, hobbies were enhanced, fantasies were elaborated, and my knowledge of Earth and beyond increased as I borrowed books on space and beyond. As a result my comprehension and reading skills improved. I started popping into Perry Common Library on the way home from school, as a way of balancing out my usually awful day, finding solaceI in the endless possibilities of the shelves.
By the time I’d left school, libraries were changing, offering new services such as music recordings. The libraries that gave me a good thorough grounding in classical music were Sutton Coldfield and Birmingham Central Library, both of which had substantial collections of CDs from all genres. Libraries also began to be the place for happenings. Events and gatherings. I went to see performances of poetry and talks on a variety of subjects. At Kings Heath library I attended a series of talks given by the group called the Gnostic Society, which nearly led to me being indoctrinated into a cult.
A library would be the first place I would experience the Information SuperHighway and the World Wide Web. For months I attended libraries in order to get online and was able to set up my first crude homepage and gasp at what would eventually change the face of the modern library and how we experience books and reading. Out went the big clunky microfiche readers and in came computers.
When I moved over to the Black Country in 2004 the first thing I did was join the library, eventually taking my own son to the library in Blackheath. I’ve also performed my own poetry in libraries over the years when the opportunity arose.
I still use the service even now, after moving home in the last few years, I’m now a member of the Dudley library region.
I have no doubt that should libraries survive these hard times, they will play a part in my senior years. Libraries in the community have done an incredible amount of good over the years, providing vital services such as internet access, study space, local history archives, shared reading groups, tea and coffee mornings for the elderly, unemployment support groups, literacy skills training and a wide variety of community clubs.
When I started thinking about writing a poetical tribute to libraries, I eventually settled on the English Ode, consisting of 10 lines to each stanza, with a rhyme scheme of ABABCDECDE. During its creation, I came to the conclusion that there was something intrinsically magical anout holding a physical book, and even more special about a building full to the brim with them, each one with the potential to inspire, educate and entertain.
Every book in the library has sat in the hands of hundreds, maybe thousands of readers throughout countless generations, and those patrons in return, will have imprinted that book with their own energy, making it a unique object.
This is something that digital books could never hope to compete with, because they don’t really exist, except on a screen. Don’t get me wrong, there is a place for digital copies, they conserve space and are portable, but they should never replace the real McCoy, but co-exist with them side by side.
It seems to me that our libraries not only unite our communities physically, but also in a metaphysical sense, by way of this residual energy being stored like a battery and retained in each book from each reader, which is in turn passed on to the next borrower, and so, on and on ad infinitum.
And so it has always been, and should be, for generations to come.
Ode To A Public Library
As a child, a trip to you was a treat.
Outside the rumble of traffic shielded
By an air lock leading to your shushed retreat,
Where hours stretched, and minutes compacted.
Mum sought romance in a Mills And Boon,
While I pulled open every neatly shelved spine,
Walking sticky fingers across strange new words.
Wonka. Snoopy. Poppins and Pooh;
Timeless tales that stayed in my young mind
Written in Penguins, Puffins and Ladybirds.
Beyond boyhoods lost innocence,
I reached out for richer pickings
You opened yourself in synthesis,
Offered covers with juicer fillings
For you became the school of me;
A fertile field where desires were grown
Far away from the mocking eyes of class.
A safe house of self discovery
Where knowledge was free to own
Without the censorship of a pass
It was your collected possibility,
That bade me yearn to learn.
Which nurtured the aesthete within me.
So turned the pages of eternal return.
I built a map from what was borrowed,
That meandered through analogous lands.
With passion it's Polaris shining bright
Along life’s long winding road.
Worlds you placed in my hands
Inspiring imagination with flight
You’ve adapted to the challenge of change,
Balanced the relevance of old and new.
Whether clouds of code and printed page,
You survived, found a way through.
So, let whispers rise into rapture!
From the chorus of community,
To honour your catalogue of treasures,
Where verses, stanzas and chapters
Hold spaces for untapped creativity,
Amid quietly contemplated pleasures.