You shouldn't be allowed to see what it is yet!

So this was in the local rag recently:

The 'anger', it turns out, is entirely felt by one man who feels so strongly about it that he wishes to remain anonymous, presumably worried that the region's roving bands of violent paedophile cartoonists will visit vengeance upon him.

He feels very deeply that the complete works of Rolf Harris should be withdrawn from the public domain:

I can understand books being written about people who committed horrific crimes, but this is something he has written himself…I think it’s disgusting this sort of offensive material is on show for anyone to see.

So, to sum up: he's quite happy for anyone to see and read books about 'horrific crimes' but thinks that  books like A Pet For You: Animal Hospital with Rolf Harris, Can You Tell What It Is Yet? and Rolf On Art: My Approach from First Steps to Finished Paintings are 'offensive'. They also found an 'outraged' user who did give his name and felt that The Best of Rolf CD should be banned too. The council isn't withdrawing the books for adults or the CD, but is taking away a book for children by Harris, as though there's something inherently paedophilic and contagious in the book, which completely baffles me. It's way beyond logic and rationality.

Why am I bothered? Because I came into the office at 7 a.m. this morning to do a live radio interview on the BBC's WM station with this chap and the presenter, and I spent yesterday thinking about how I feel. Sadly, our defender of public morality either didn't wake up or thought better of making a public stand: he didn't answer, and then switched off, his phone. We were going to talk about censorship, the nature of offence, the history of book-banning and whether art and artists can and should be treated distinctly.

Rather than let good material go to waste, you can have my take on the Filthy Books Furore. I guess that you won't be surprised that I'm against censoring books by bad people. I tend to believe that reading Rolf's book on art won't make you a bad person, it'll make you a bad artist. His books aren't offensive: he is. There's a difference. If you don't want Rolf to make 6p in royalties, don't take out his book.

I'd probably yank biographies of Savile and Harris from the shelves on the grounds that they're out of date, but keep the autobiographies. I strongly believe that a society that wants to understand itself shouldn't sweep material under the carpet but examine it. Savile's autobiography was astonishingly candid: perhaps closer reading would have caught him while he yet lived.

I just don't think that art should be judged by the standards of the artist's morality. Rolf's art was always bad art, whatever we did or didn't know about him. Caravaggio was a murderer: should we take his paintings down? The case I know most about is one I was going to mention on air because it's directly relevant to the BBC. Eric Gill was a talent sculptor, typographer and artist - one of the most fascinating characters of the twentieth-century. You've seen his work millions of times, because he designed Gill Sans, a beautiful typeface:

As well as typography, he carved the astonishing Prospero and Ariel figures on the BBC's Broadcasting House, and the Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral:

Eric Gill: Ariel Between Wisdom and Gaiety

I tell my Media Ethics students about Eric Gill. I show them the artwork. Then I tell them about his sex life. He had affairs with his sisters (usually no reaction). He had sex with his daughters (some disquiet). He had sex with his dog (utter horror: I usually tease them for their moral hierarchies by observing that it's probably less cruel to have sex with an animal than to kill it, and ask what they had for lunch).

Does this catalogue of horrors mean that Gill's artwork is tainted? I don't think it does. Gill painted and sculpted eroticised images of his daughters and sister Gladys. Knowing this adds a degree of horror, but if I'd never know who the models were, or what their relationship was, I don't think anything intrinsic in the artwork would have communicated abuse or taboo. In many ways, knowing the background to some of the art makes it more complex and intense. I wouldn't hide them away because I don't think there's a magical connection between an artist's morality and his or her work. There are exceptions: I do think Graham Ovenden's art was explicitly paedophilic and don't believe his exquisite technique entitles him to a free pass.

Jimmy Savile recorded a series of road safety adverts, like this one:



Should this be banned? I think not. The message is unaffected by what we now know about Savile. In its time and context, it was perfectly reasonable, and retrospective horror about what Savile was up to in other situations doesn't taint the purpose and content of this text.

Books and pictures don't commit crimes. Writers, artists and photographers do. I agree with the ban on paedophilic photography and film because it requires the abuse of real people in its production. I agree with the ban on the circulation of such material because it stimulates the further abuse of real people. I disagree with the ban on fictional representations of illegal acts however. I don't think the imagination can be legislated against, however vile the products of that imagination are. I don't think fiction creates real victims. I think we should ban the execution of actual crimes, not potential ones.

Secondly, a blanket ban on the discussion or representation of illegal acts prevents understanding them. Book Ban Man explicitly says he's happy for people to read about 'horrific crimes'. He clearly doesn't think that reading about murder or sexual violence leads to more murder or sexual violence - so why does he think that a criminal's thoughts on felt-tip line drawing is 'offensive'? Though if he feels that no books by criminals should be allowed on the shelves, I'm tempted to agree: let's rid public libraries of the complete works of Jeffrey Archer!

Let's talk about Nabokov. Lolita is one of the vilest books I've ever read. As you probably know, it's an exploration of a much older man's sexual obsession with a very young girl. I do actually think that it's paedophilic, and that fascination with young girls pervades much of Nabokov's work. I still wouldn't ban Lolita nor do I think even great literature, let alone Rolf Harris's books should be totemised as magical objects with the power to turn ordinary people into slavering perverted beasts. Texts are framed and contextualised in particular ways: while I find Lolita creepy and unpleasant, I don't think it's an advert for an act society has deemed beyond the Pale. Additionally, texts don't exist in a vacuum. They aren't magic: readers create texts by reading from their own unique perspectives. I'm sure a determined paedophile could manage to turn Lolita into simplistic one-handed entertainment, and perhaps even Rolf on Art, but the problem is with the reader: s/he's the paedophile, not the book. S/he still would be even if the book had never been read. There's only a social and legal problem if the reader commissions or commits a paedophilic act.

Away from the sphere of illegal acts, I'm generally against censorship of other material. Too many texts have been banned because some politician or campaigner sees temporary, local advantage in it. I'm sure Evelyn Waugh had Ulysses in mind when he lampooned the government in the first chapter of Vile Bodies, in which poor Adam has his autobiographical manuscript confiscated by customs.

Oscar Wilde, Radclyffe Hall, Joyce, To Kill a Mockingbird, Harry Potter…all have been subject to bans for offending someone (well-meaning liberals don't like To Kill… being used in classrooms because it uses authentic but now-offensive racial epithets, while evangelists in the US condemn Rowling for promoting witchcraft). Social mores are complex and fluid: banning texts often seems very silly in a short space of time. It really bothers me that those with the loudest voices or cultural capital get to decide what gets banned. This isn't mature, democratic debate. It's the morality of the lynch mob.

It's impossible to ban books or anything else anyway. The Spycatcher case established that national boundaries had become meaningless: the book was banned in the UK but published overseas, and a judge ruled that as overseas publication had put any sensitive material in the public domain, British publication may as well go ahead. And this is before the internet, of course. Despite the spirited efforts of every government, material can't be buried for long. If all the libraries removed Rolf Harris's books from the shelves, anyone determined to learn how to draw anthropomorphic kangaroos could locate a copy on the web in seconds.

No, physical interdiction and legal intervention aren't any good when we're talking about ideas. I'm perfectly happy to ban the circulation of material depicting illegal acts, but it's far more important to discuss why we have taboos, and educate people so that they either don't feel or don't act on desires we collectively and calmly decide are damaging.

So anyway, that's what I'd have said in my 2 and a half minutes on local radio. And then the local paper would have led a violent mob to my front door.

Oh, and a final word of advice to libraries and readers. Don't buy books because they're (ghost)-written by celebrities. Buy books on the basis of quality.

Quick, very naive question on e-books

Our university library is adopting the policy of only buying electronic versions of books when it can. I can see the attractions: instant access to many people simultaneously, less wear and tear, less space used.

But does it alter the ways in which we own, relate to and use books, and do these questions have any relevance in an academic setting? I gather that an e-book on your Kindle is owned by the copyright holder: it can be wiped from your machine, and you can't give it or lend it to anyone. Is it the same for libraries and their users?

I worry that the e-book distances us from the text: it can't be underlined, scribbled on, held open with a mug while you consult one of the other ten books lying open on your desk, you can't stick bits of paper in to mark an important point that does/doesn't relate to the page you're currently reading. Perhaps there are solutions to these things: my students are bringing Kindles to class with no discernible loss, and in some ways its better: many texts which would never have been printed are now available electronically.

However, there is an identifiable academic failing. Many students are now using Google Books as a primary research tool: searching for a word or phrase, extracting it from the Google or e-book source and claiming to have read the text. So often I find the relevant passage and discover that the student's misunderstood because they haven't read beyond the sentence, page or paragraph from which the quote came. This isn't research: it's data-mining: they're not the same thing.

On a minor point: I hate reading on a screen - my eyes really hurt after a while, which is why I resist electronic marking. I can't face reading 400 essays on a computer, nor do I want to read 400 pages of a critical text on one.

But as I say - it's an area I've not investigated. What are the gains and losses from a bookless academic library?

Update: fascinating defence of e-books by Tim Pears in the NY Review of Books.

'…the relics of a world that progress threw away' (on Libraries and Sex)

OK, I'm not very good at erotica, but if libraries and porn go together in your filthy minds, this article in the Paris Review should be checked out (arf). I've no need to associate libraries with sex - they're sites of extreme pleasure without it. Though there's something masochistic about entering somewhere in which the books can only be handled, borrowed, but never owned. The teases!

I like the way he's holding on to the book. It's probably on short-loan.

Each year, new titles are added to the librarian-porn bookshelf. This past season’s crop included additions like Hot for Librarian by Anastasia Carrera; Lucy the Librarian—Dewey and His Decimal 

Sadly, the author's conclusion is that modern library porn removes the action from the library itself: the stereotypical female librarian is the object of the fantasy (never the subject), rather than the location. She is assumed, with her spectacle and bun, to be repressed and needing sexual liberation: recognition is rarely given (I should confess I haven't read many of these) to the liberatory possibilities of the knowledge contained in the library, unlike the 18th-19th century library porn: for the Enlightenment, sexual and intellectual liberation were of a piece and so libraries were natural sites for discovery in both senses.

On the other hand, our author suggests that modern library porn enunciates the alienation found in sexual cyberspace: devotees and characters search for a more personal and more intellectual climax than the atomised and individual life of the sex-surfer:

Lucy’s very real encounter in the stacks is the modern library’s attempted rejoinder to the loneliness of life online. The physicality of the library space is presented here as a concrete alternative to the interminable virtualness of contemporary erotic imagination. It’s the last argument for the library’s continued relevance as a space and of the subversive potential of books—both of which are, ironically, called into question by the very existence of Lucy. This book, like all recent library-porn books, cannot not be found on any actual shelf in the real world. It lives exclusively in virtual space.  

The threat of extinction has become a mainstay of recent library porn: again and again, the neglected love life of the librarian is a stand-in for the doomed state of the library generally.

The library sex fantasy has, in other words, entered an apocalyptic period. “Throw me on my back in the dark room with the microfiche,” says the narrator of “Checking Out,” the final story of 2011’s Nympho Librarian. “Fuck me amidst the relics of a world that progress threw away.”  

This is certainly something that speaks to me. In this country, libraries are being closed every day, thanks to the philistine government's preference for bombs over books. Here's a taster from the age of Austerity Erotica.

Soaked to the skin through her clinging, low-cut silk blouse and short skirt, lissom Lisa scurried up the steps of the library, knowing that within its close and labyrinthine walls, fulfilment - in so many ways - awaited her. Grasping the smooth, hard knob, she paused a moment before taking the plunge into a world of self-discovery. But as she slowly turned the handle, she spotted a sign pasted on the window.
'This library is now closed to improve customer experience. Clients may now take advantage of the Mobile Learning Centre (Fridays 6 a.m.-6.33 a.m every other month) or follow us on Twitter'.
Her hand fell from the door and, shivering now in the freezing rain, she trudged home to a low-fat Horlicks and a copy of More. The dream was over. 

Of course, libraries are no longer up to it architecturally. Too much plate glass, too many 'talk zones' and 'group…study areas'. Coffee bars and computers have taken over from dark corners and wide sturdy tables. They're explicitly social sites now, rather than places in which individuals skulk, seeking enlightenment or furtive romance.

A vision of my future

…and Mark's present: he has 15,000+ books and his ceilings collapsed quite some time ago.

This is actually an art installation for VIA advertising agency which has moved into a former public library in Portland (presumably Oregon). This is, of course, the kind of thing that these disgusting people might think 'ironic'. I prefer to assume that the artist is using the books as a kind of threat: that they represent erudition and conscience, eternally promising to break through the psychic defences ad execs raise against the possibility that morality might invade their daily lives. The artwork is in the basement - unlikely to be seen too often I suppose, but symbolically representing the unconscious which always threatens to irrupt into the consciousness.

It's pleasing to imagine that the shades of the building's former upright purpose might crowd round its new and unwelcome inhabitants.

Sound familiar

In a trenchant defence of the public moral and intellectual value of libraries (and not just as book warehouses), Alan Bennett writes this:

a young man, standing in front of a bookcase feeling baffled. He – and occasionally she – is overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that has been written and the ground to be covered.’ 

‘All these books. I’ll never catch up,’ wails the young Joe Orton in the film script of Prick Up Your Ears, and in The Old Country another young man reacts more dramatically, by hurling half the books to the floor. In Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf someone else gives vent to their frustration with literature by drawing breasts on a photograph of Virginia Woolf and kitting out E.M. Forster with a big cigar. Orton himself notoriously defaced library books before starting to write books himself. This resentment, which was, I suppose, somewhere mine, had to do with feeling shut out. A library, I used to feel, was like a cocktail party with everybody standing with their back to me; I could not find a way in. 

Welcome to my world. Even worse, I've bought the bloody things.  It feels faintly embarrassing to be defending libraries against Conservative attacks. After all, the stately homes from whence (see that, Ben?) the current crop have oiled, all have private libraries of their own. Eton has, no doubt, a fine library, and the libraries of the Oxford colleges inhabited by these lordly types are so fine as to be tourist attractions.

Perhaps that's the problem. Their home libraries aren't resources, they're decoration. Their college libraries are literally exclusive. The oiks can buy tickets to ooh and aah at the leather bindings and stern busts, but they're not invited to open the books. This lot resent the idea that they (and their imaginary public) should pay taxes for people to read Catherine Cookson and Horrid Histories and Sven Hassel etc.

To them, knowledge and enjoyment are private goods to be bought and paid for. To me, libraries are where you gain your freedom. My parents are highly educated, literate types. But if I read only the books they bought, I'd have a fantastic working knowledge of church architecture, Catholic doctrine, dermatological complaints, paediatric medicine and hymn lyrics. Admittedly, I've soaked up a lot of this stuff. But it was libraries which let me explore space and time, find out about the radical histories of Britain, Ireland, Spain, discover science and rebellion and poetry and Tom Paine and Mervyn Peake and Willa Cather. Much of this was smuggled into the house, caused violent arguments and got returned unread by and angry parent.

And if annoying your parents isn't a good enough reason to defend libraries, nothing is.

Last word to Bennett:

I have been discussing libraries as places and in the current struggle to preserve public libraries not enough stress has been laid on the library as a place not just a facility. To a child living in high flats, say, where space is at a premium and peace and quiet not always easy to find, a library is a haven. But, saying that, a library needs to be handy and local; it shouldn’t require an expedition. Municipal authorities of all parties point to splendid new and scheduled central libraries as if this discharges them of their obligations. It doesn’t. For a child a library needs to be round the corner. And if we lose local libraries it is children who will suffer. Of the libraries I have mentioned the most important for me was that first one, the dark and unprepossessing Armley Junior Library. I had just learned to read. I needed books. Add computers to that requirement maybe but a child from a poor family is today in exactly the same boat.  

It’s hard not to think that like other Tory policies privatising the libraries has been lying dormant for 15 years, just waiting for a convenient crisis to smuggle it through. Libraries are, after all, as another think tank clown opined a few weeks ago, ‘a valuable retail outlet’.

Learning from the Ancients

A friend of mine gave me an intriguing book recently, More Essays of Today, edited by F. H. Pritchard and published in 1928. I added it to the pile and only got round to leafing through it a couple of days ago.

Each essay is 3-5 pages long, is often quirky, if not whimsical. And yet - so far they're remarkably relevant: perhaps the title was prophetic. The first essay is J. C. Squire's 'Moving a Library', an amusing little squib reproducing most accurately the mental and physical terrors of the undertaking - something my friends will appreciate, having help me out devotedly when I moved house.

Night after night I have spent carting down two flights of stairs more books htan I ever thought I possessed. Journey after journey, as monotonously regular as the progresses of a train round the Inner Circle: upstairs empty-handed and downstairs creeping with a decrepit crouch, a tall, crazy, dangerously bulging column of books wedged betwen my two hands and the indomitable point of my chin… at times during the process one hates books as the slaves who built the Pyramids must have hated public monuments. A strong and bitter book-sickness floods one's soul. How ignominious to be strapped to this ponderous mass of paper, print, and dead men's sentiments! Would it not be better, finer, braver, to leave the rubbish where it lies and walk out into the world a free, untrammelled, illiterate Superman? Civilization! Pah!

Unlike our current government, whose library closure plan is seemingly designed to produce the illiterate Superman, our hero recovers sufficiently to consider the much-discussed problems of how to arrange one's collection (he likes size/chronology/genre) and the 'despair' invoked by the intrusion of 'Stodge' onto the shelves of 'Pure literature' (ah, how Leavisian - I could devote a whole lecture to that one sentence) before ending on a hopeful quotation from Ruskin: 'I don't suppose I shall do it again for months and months and months'.

Serendipitously, the next essay is Reverend George A. Birmingham's 'Asking Questions', a longer and passionate diatribe on the scourge of the questionnaire. The good vicar doesn't like forms, especially those devoted to easily-available information, and those which are never actually consulted, a test he assays by inflating the size of his schoolroom to monstrous proportions then shrinking it to the size of a sentry box in each successive year.

I have never in my life been tempted to issue a questionnaire. The fact that I am forced to use this word - there being no English equivalent - proves that the thing itself is of foreign origin and that the vice is not native with us. That the word has a secondary meaning among the French, 'torturer', shows what they think of it.

Of course a pretence is made that the returns are required for the compilation of statistics… If we really prevented the compiling of statistics we ought to be given medals… for statistics are not merely useless - they are misleading, far more dangerously misleading even than the speeches of politicians…

Year by year, the number of these papers of questions increases. Year by year more of our time is wasted in writing answers. Year by year the nervous irritation consequent on wrestling with returns gets worse. 

The only remedy I can think of is to kill a few of the people who issue these forms. Perhaps five or six would be enough. The others, fearing the fate of their fellows, would be cowed into quiescence. Morally I think these executions would be as justifiable as the hanging of murderers, for we should be ridding society of pestilent nuisances. [Or if he could reach the head questioner] it would be better to try to cure him. That might be done if he were shut up in an asylum, like those provided for inebriates, and compelled to work for eight hours every day at a typewriter which had no note of interrogation on any of its keys. 

Now why did I say 'serendipitously'? Well, I'm drowning in these things. It's census time in the UK. The outsourced contract has gone to international gun-runner Lockheed Martin, which hasn't pleased many people. Some questions are contentious. After the previous census's successful Jedi Rebellion (enough people wrote in Jedi under 'religion' to skew the figures pleasingly), should we atheists stick to that or write 'no religion' (and perhaps acquire some state-funded atheist schools alongside the Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Hindus and Muslims).

My students are given module evaluation forms and mid-module evaluation forms. While we stir up their curriculum to suit the university's financial problems and managerial obsessions, we ask them to fill in the National Student Survey. I'm being asked to fill in another form detailing my exact work patterns under various headings.

The good Reverend was on to something. Decades before Foucault et al., George hit upon the disciplinary system: the administrative demands of the institution aren't merely a massive job creation scheme (The Hegemon has 1500+ administrators and 700 teachers) but a control system. Knowledge IS power. Making us analyse our every move and report them internalises a repressive system. It tames us, it makes us behave, it might even persuade us of the benevolence of managerial activity.

Should I be hanging my line managers from a lamp-post? Probably not. George points out that his boss, the rural Dean, has a wife and family to support, and probably hates questionnaires too. But like him, I can't help but wonder if the defenestration of those at the top (Michael Gove? Willetts? the Vice-Chancellor?) would lighten the burden somewhat…

Autobibliography

I read an interesting piece about what our personal libraries say about us. It shouldn't be a surprise that collections indicate a cultural context: the first thing I do in a stranger's house is go through their bookshelves and music collection. If there isn't one… oh dear. If it's hidden away, that's fairly suspicious. Reams of anthologies tell us that the core is an English degree curriculum. Flashes of orange-spined Penguins imply diligent trawls through second-hand bookshops or an eye for design. Virago apples tell us we're being entertained by someone with feminist tendencies, whereas a full set of Wodehouse indicates a nostalgic desire for cossetting and carefree luxury (I possess lots of all these categories by the way: my collection indicates nothing more than bibliomania, though the poetry section is sadly lacking, not that I have an internal critic telling me I'm a moron at all).

How are books arranged? Mine are boringly alphabetical, without separation for genre - Mark's library is organised professionally using the Dewey Decimal system. Actually, my unread books are organised by novels/non-fiction/poetry/drama/biography/autobiography. Other people like all their Penguins in a row or a chronological structure. That would be interesting, though I'd agonize: chronologically by first publication or your edition? What about Penguin who for decades didn't date subsequent impressions and editions (the bastards). How about subject matter?

That's all by the by. The article I read is about the interesting little bits about your personal collection: when you acquired books (Mark scrupulously records on the flyleaf when and for how much he got each one of his 14,000+ books) and what you've done with them. I like finding inscriptions and dedications, old bookmarks (once a perfectly preserved crocus fell out), receipts and jottings. If I look at my books, I find receipts from shops all over the country and years back: Kwik Save Broken Biscuits, 37p marked the spot in The Faerie Queene at which I gave up.

Sometimes your books tell you so much more about what's happened to you. For instance, my collection of Paul Auster and Don Delillo texts. I read New York Trilogy for university and loved it, which tells you that I'm geekily male, interested in structure and postmodernism and cleverness. So I bought all the other books he'd published up to then, in a variety of new and second-hand editions. But by a couple of years later, I'd continued buying work by these authors, but they're not on the shelves with NYT. They're languishing in the unread section, and the collection isn't complete as my enthusiasm, judgement and tastes change.

Another thing you can tell from my collection is how much money I have at any particular time. Although my purchasing habits are sometimes arbitrary, there are authors whose work I buy automatically. When I have money, I'll buy the hardcover which is published first, at greater expense. When I don't, I'll force myself to wait (yes, it does happen occasionally) for the paperback or a second-hand copy. Far too often, I buy the hardcover at full price and find it in The Works for £3.99 only a few weeks later, and curse myself for foolishness. My Terry Pratchett books consist of two shelves of paperbacks (from when I was a teenager and then poor student), then leap into a shelf of hardcovers marking my entry into the labour market.

There's also a kind of apartheid going on in my collection. At work, I have the books I'm working on at the moment, plus all the new books I've bought but not read, because my house is already full. But at home, the general shelves have some things that might be considered Literature mixed in with what I've bought for pleasure. Except that I have a couple of bookcases devoted to Welsh literature, which was both pleasure and what I formerly worked on (and will again, by Grabthar's Hammer), and a couple of bookcases of literary theory and the like. I sometimes think that stuff should be at work, but then I think that it separates my professional life and my personal interior life. However: am I keeping the theory books at home as part of a performance of intellectual activity - showing visitors what I'm 'really like' after they've seen all the 'fun' books? Why not mix the academic in with the general population - the separation is artificial, after all? (Partly because they're easier to find, of course). One of the great things about my job is that it's based on what I'd do anyway: read and talk about books, so keeping 'work' books at work and 'other' things at home seems somehow wrong - and in any case, my Cultural Studies angel keeps whispering to me that separation implies Leavisite value judgements.

A few years ago, I lost my passport. I had to phone the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs to cancel it, provide a police report and beg for a new one. It was made very clear that I'd been irresponsible. I suspected that my landlord had thrown it away because he accidentally disposed of a box of my stuff. How I cursed him.

A few months ago, I found it. It was serving as a bookmark in a very dry analysis of masculinity in modernist poetry. I am ashamed.

Alan Moore Knows The Score

Alan Moore, author of V for Vendetta, Watchmen and a host of other works of subcultural genius, loves libraries. Perhaps the Tories hate them because subversives like Moore know how important they are. As does Nicky Wire of the Manic Street Preachers.

Leave our libraries alone!

One of the most depressing features about the Tory/Lib Dem government is it's kneejerk response to economic problems: attack the poor. Whether it's housing benefit, schools funding, tuition fees, transport or healthcare, they do the same thing: reduce services, and cut taxes for the corporations and the rich. 


Amongst these nastly little attacks on the national fabric is an apparently concerted effort to close down free public libraries across the country: rich people, who are mostly Tories, don't borrow books. They buy them.


Libraries are deeply subversive institutions. Within their walls are the tools for shaping a new world. From SF to philosophy to romance, the books sketch out visions of other - dystopian and utopian - possibilities. Any of you can walk in and come out with Plato, Aristotle, Thoreau, Ken MacLeod, Austen, Dickens or even Catherine bloody Cookson if that's what you want. Compared to them, bookshops and the well-stocked libraries of private schools are bastions of privilege and class warfare: knowledge is there but only if you've got the cash. What a change from the Victorian period, in which the super-rich were endowing free public libraries across the world, rather than closing them. 


We need to resist this Philistine attack. The resistance has already begun. Please, please read this transcript of the great Philip Pullman's speech in defence of libraries and a humane way of life.

It’s imported the worst excesses of market fundamentalism into the one arena that used to be safe from them, the one part of our public and social life that used to be free of the commercial pressure to win or to lose, to survive or to die, which is the very essence of the religion of the market. Like all fundamentalists who get their clammy hands on the levers of political power, the market fanatics are going to kill off every humane, life-enhancing, generous, imaginative and decent corner of our public life.

 The greedy ghost understands profit all right. But that’s all he understands. What he doesn’t understand is enterprises that don’t make a profit, because they’re not set up to do that but to do something different. He doesn’t understand libraries at all, for instance. That branch – how much money did it make last year? Why aren’t you charging higher fines? Why don’t you charge for library cards? Why don’t you charge for every catalogue search? Reserving books – you should charge a lot more for that. Those bookshelves over there – what’s on them? Philosophy? And how many people looked at them last week? Three? Empty those shelves and fill them up with celebrity memoirs.

That’s all the greedy ghost thinks libraries are for. 

The ultimate source is probably the tendency in some of us, part of our psychological inheritance from our far-distant ancestors, the tendency to look for extreme solutions, absolute truths, abstract answers. All fanatics and fundamentalists share this tendency, which is so alien and unpleasing to the rest of us. The theory says they must do such-and-such, so they do it, never mind the human consequences, never mind the social cost, never mind the terrible damage to the fabric of everything decent and humane.

My mother took me to the public library just off Battersea Park Road and enrolled me. I was thrilled. All those books, and I was allowed to borrow whichever I wanted! And I remember some of the first books I borrowed and fell in love with: the Moomin books by Tove Jansson; a French novel for children called A Hundred Million Francs; why did I like that?

The blessed privacy! No-one else can get in the way, no-one else can invade it, no-one else even knows what’s going on in that wonderful space that opens up between the reader and the book. That open democratic space full of thrills, full of excitement and fear, full of astonishment, where your own emotions and ideas are given back to you clarified, magnified, purified, valued. You’re a citizen of that great democratic space that opens up between you and the book. And the body that gave it to you is the public library. Can I possibly convey the magnitude of that gift?

 I love the public library service for what it did for me as a child and as a student and as an adult. I love it because its presence in a town or a city reminds us that there are things above profit, things that profit knows nothing about, things that have the power to baffle the greedy ghost of market fundamentalism, things that stand for civic decency and public respect for imagination and knowledge and the value of simple delight.