By Joan
Bakewell, Broadcaster
Public
libraries face an uncertain future but the value of reading is irreplaceable,
says Joan Bakewell in her A Point of View column.
I was
returning a library book last week. It had been important in some research I
was doing so I sought to renew it. "No, I'm afraid it's in demand by
someone else," came the reply.
A book
first published in 1964 was still needed. I'm not surprised. Many books last a
lifetime and go on being read. Then, on the library counter, I noticed
printouts from our local newspaper. The headline was a question - Libraries
slashed? - it asked.
I recall
a Latin grammar construction defined as "expecting the answer 'yes'".
I felt this applied to the headline. We in the London borough where I live know
there will be massive council cuts. In London as a whole there are fears that
130 libraries could go.
And
things are bad across the country. Buckinghamshire is said to be considering
closing among others the Great Missenden library, inspiration for Roald Dahl's
Matilda, who read library books. He would be appalled.
Another
book event. Last week I helped celebrate the publication of probably the
definitive account of the life and art of the painter LS Lowry, by Dr Tom
Rosenthal. It was held in the gorgeous setting of Christies sales rooms, where
a fine array of Lowry's work graced the walls.
Later in
the week some 20 of his paintings sold there for nearly £5.2m. There was an
irony in seeing Lowry's bleak depictions of the Lancashire poor going for such
high prices. Here they were, the huddled masses, hurrying from the factory, to
the football match, crowding round a street accident, or spending their
unsmiling leisure still fully clad on Lancashire's beaches.
Lowry's
work divides people There are those who admire his bleak vision of the world he
knew in the 30s and 40s, and those who demean it as nothing more than a host of
matchstick men. I am of the former persuasion.
My reason
is more than aesthetic, I have a local connection. My own great aunt lived in
Salford at Crescent View, just such a row of terrace houses as Lowry painted. I
knew the feel of Salford's streets, its little picket fences, and I loved the
smell of Nana's stuffy kitchen, full of cooking and drying clothes.
The
meaning of books came to me from just such a background. From the age of seven
my father attended what was then called Chetham's Hospital in Manchester, a
charity school for 40 poor boys founded in the 17th Century as the legacy of
Humphrey Chetham. He was a wily old wool merchant whose motto "Quod tuum
tene" - hold on to what is yours - just about sums up the industrial
revolution that was to engulf the city and make it rich and make it poor.
But
Chetham was a philanthropist and left provision not only for a school, but for
a library within the same building. That library survives in its original glory
- theology, law, local records, leather bound, beautifully preserved. Its
Jacobean setting is one of the unsung treasures of Manchester, part of what is
now the illustrious Chethams Music School.
The
schoolboys in my father's day didn't read such books of course, they had their
noses into Rider Haggard and Harrison Ainsworth. But my father - and his
brothers - held the library in awe, acknowledging as everyone then did that
learning and scholarship are among man's highest pursuits.
In the
poverty that was then Salford, libraries were cherished. They were seen as the
resource for the poor, where they could learn and begin to understand about the
world beyond those Lowry streets.
The book
I was returning to my local library is subtitled A Study in Protest. It is in
fact an account by Christopher Driver of the rise of the anti-nuclear bomb
campaigns of the late 50s and early 60s. Then as now, unruly groups grabbed the
headlines. They always do.
But the
book tells of concerted and sustained action to bring pressure on world powers
to abandon nuclear weapons. We know they failed, but along the way they
influenced public and world opinion to an extent that perhaps contributed to
the test-ban treaties that were to be signed in the 1960s, in the years after
the Cuba crisis.
The young
have again been out on the streets in their thousands and students are meeting
and plotting more protests even now. Will those of us who love libraries be
able to make our voices heard? It would be hard to combat allegations of
middle-class elitism, and indeed there is a case to answer. If the pressure on
finances is so great, at least as far as the coalition believe, then the availability
of free books for all will need its
defenders.
My
defence should not be seen as the attempt merely to rescue a small building in
a particular borough, or any other particular places threatened with closure.
Rather it is a rallying call for the concept of free libraries. In our culture
the library stands as tall and as significant as a parish church or the finest
cathedral. It goes back to the times when ideas first began to circulate in the
known world. I worry where wisdom will come from.
I am a major
consumer of information on the internet. I know that academics and students
access information there more quickly and more specifically than they can faced
with a shelf load of books. But it's not that relationship I'm concerned about.
I offer
you two scenarios. I am on a train going north, the scenery beyond York is
glorious and in the slanting light of a winter afternoon has a magical quality
not to miss. So I put down the paperback to enjoy it, then I resume my read.
Again, on holiday, deck chair beside a blue swimming pool, a landscape of
rolling hills and green pastures unfolds before me. I set aside the paperback
to enjoy the view, and then return to the pages.
I live
with the tensions between the world out there I want to see and even contemplate,
and the inner world to which the book gives me access. It is the inner rewards
of reading a book in a private and concentrated way that lead you into realms
of your own imagination and thought that no other process offers. Something
happens between the words and the brain that is unique to the moment and to
your own sensibilities.
It is
why, at such moments, it is so awful to be interrupted - and why I am
frequently late at meetings because I find it hard to tear myself away. Any
society that doesn't value the richness of this encounter with ideas and the
imagination will impoverish its citizens.
Of
course, there are loads of books around. You can pick up a paperback for a few
pounds that will last many years (my shelves are full of ageing paperbacks whose
yellowing pages crack when I open them - only hardbacks last forever).
Publishers think books are worth publishing, supermarkets think they are worth
stacking on their shelves. But these are market transactions. The free public
library service is the only way for everyone to have access for free to objects
that carry the world's wisdom.
Soon we
will all be asked to tell the state what makes us happy, what increases our
well-being. No doubt someone will come up with measurements of stress and
depression. We might be asked about our sense of neighbourliness or degrees of
family closeness. Whether
we are hungry or cold or neglected.
There are
clearly data about social conditions that are worth collecting, but happiness
is a dangerous word. It embraces all the subjectivity of our emotions and inner
serenity. It is a reflection of our character, the degree we are wracked by
ambition or resentment, by envy or greed. It embraces what might be called
spiritual well-being, the sort that might be underpinned by a happy marriage, a
satisfying career, deep religious conviction.
Already
television vox pops have asked people in the street what makes them happy and
had replies that range from their children's laughter, to the music of
Beethoven.
I think
there might be many who consider one kind of happiness to be a deep armchair, a
warm fire and a favourite book.
Source: bbc.co.uk
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