Losing libraries

North. South. Front and back. It’s hard to keep track.

On our recent long weekend away I suffered from a disappearing library. University library at that.

We stayed in a flat in St Andrews’ North Street. South side. Front windows looked out onto the library across the road. Back windows looked south. It was probably the Waterstones building we saw the back of.

Bedrooms faced front, i.e. north. Living room faced south.

Are you with me so far?

I was pleased to to have a view of the large library building where Daughter once collected her knowledge. Did her homework. But when I sat down in ‘my’ armchair, I was confused because the library wasn’t there. Just some roof top. Wrong windows. Something about which room faces front? Or back. Also, isn’t front always south? Apparently not.

Three days wasn’t long enough to learn where the library was. But I’m sure a library ought to be visible from a person’s armchair…

At least the flat had books. I’d have been quite happy to read some of them, had I come unprepared. There was also a selection of books for sale at Kinross Services, where we had time to kill while the car charged, which it only did because there was literally no parking (Bank Holiday weekend). At all. So I made the executive decision that since the charging spots were empty and we had a car that could ‘eat’ there, that’s what we would do.

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Debi draws

I drew quite a passable rabbit, if I say so myself.

Thursday to Saturday this week Stirling libraries had a little online book festival, Smallprint 2021. You can find it on Facebook. That’s also where you can find (I don’t know how long for, possibly forever) the videos where several of our best author/illustrators showed off their skills, and read books to young fans.

Debi Gliori welcomed us to her International Shedquarters, just outside Edinburgh. She likes rabbits. So do I, as long as they leave my garden alone. Debi showed us all her rabbit books, and then she showed us her sketches of inspagination (her word) for rabbits, one of which went from being Alfie to being Pip, in The Scariest Thing of All.

Pip is so afraid that he makes long lists of everything that scares him. Debi read the whole book about Pip and the new big thing that scared him.

After that she showed us how to draw our own rabbit, and I absolutely aced it. And after that, Debi wanted us to draw our own very scariest thing, using our own items from around the house. She showed us her scariest, which was two pairs of scissors, the four-legged pest of Corona. Complete with eyeballs.

She finished off by reminding us that it’s the insides of our heads that are scariest of all.

Being rather professional, Debi had prepared proper end of movie slides, including the camera person’s name. By witchy coincidence I had been thinking of Katie Rose just the other day.

These two will go far.

Was happiness wasted on him?

We ‘went’ to Kirkland Ciccone’s book launch this evening. By which I mean we attended the online launch, happening on Facebook, and which Daughter cast to the television, for us to sit in comfort and enjoy.

Well, after some ‘casting around’ for the actual event, we found it, but immediately discarded it, since it was clearly a mistake, what with mad fuzzy lines in colour and then there was some maniac who muttered curses, and fairly loudly too.

Turned out it was the real thing. Very psychedelic, it was. But once our dear host had been messaged to mute his sound, we could actually make out what was being said in his interview with Gillian Hunt at Cumbernauld Library. Well, some of it… And the rest was taken care of by some of the most inspired subtitles I’ve come across in my life. ‘Hommage’ turned into ‘a mash.’ And why not? Kirkie mentioned that he would usually launch his books at Waterstones in Argyle Street, which became ‘our street.’ That too.

He read the haircut episode from the book.

Did I mention the new book? It’s for adults. Hah. It’s called Happiness Is Wasted On Me.

And then he was at home again, Kirkie. He wasn’t sure we could hear or see him, when we could actually do both. Sort of. He kept breaking up, and laughing so much that we decided he’d overdosed on IrnBru. But he was very Kirkie.

He has a playlist that goes with the book, somehow. Daughter warned me never to try listening to it. (As if I would.)

Kirkie is very popular. The event was well attended and we all love him. But next time I’ll insist he takes Daughter’s advice on the technical stuff.

Save the library?

This is something I wasn’t expecting. When you have a nice old library building, funded by Andrew Carnegie over a hundred years ago, you don’t expect to have the library moving into the former shop premises of Argos.

If I understand it right, old Argos isn’t big enough. Yes, it would bring the library ‘to the people’, or it would if there are enough people left visiting the shopping precinct in Stockport. It’s been on its way down for some time.

Yes, I know some people are worried about going into libraries, because they are not used to them, and the building might feel too grand for the likes of an ordinary person. The thing is, when I lived in Stockport, the library was what I encountered first, on arriving into town. It’s right there when you get off the train. Or the bus outside McDonald’s.

The arguments for the move, at least for the position of old Library versus Argos, are not entirely unsound. But I’m thinking here of when my other old library, the one in Halmstad, was replaced with a new, more modern building some years ago. I was really against it. But the fact is, the new library building is far better.

Yes, my childhood memories are somewhere else, but that building still remains, used for other things now. The new one is bigger and more luxurious. Because it was built to be a library, and to be larger, to accommodate everything that was needed.

It doesn’t sound as if the Stockport plans would do that. Smaller and not purpose built sounds worse, to my mind.

I did sign the [Stockport] petition. I feel there should be more thought going into this. Yes, maybe the old building can be kept and used for something truly great, although I would have believed more in that ten years ago. But the message is that library users don’t need or deserve much. A former shop will do.

What Mr Carnegie would think I’m not sure. But we generally like our gifts to be appreciated.

Privy-thèque

Loo and behold, a privy-théque!

Thank goodness for far-flung friends and authors. Especially those carrying a camera. And with a sense for the quirky, and an idea that bookwitches might need something fun to write about.

I mean, you know I like toilets. In case one needs to go. Having been brought up on [summer] privies, I don’t mind them. They still exist in Sweden, often as the beach alternative to plumbing. (Or in someone’s simpler type of summer accommodation.)

There is also the longstanding tradition of reading when on the toilet (although I frown on this, because there could be a queue), and many keep some book or magazine handy.

Now Ingrid Magnusson Rading has been for a walk near the place she can still get to, and I can’t, and she made a discovery outside the old lifeboat station. No, not the privy. We knew about that. But its new purpose, complete with a sign and everything.

It’s now a library! And a privy. Or maybe more a swapping post. There are books. The sign says to take a book home if you like it, and to leave behind one that you reckon others would benefit from reading.

And the view! No longer available for those on the throne, as the inside of the new-ish facility has been turned 90 degrees. Before, if you didn’t crave privacy, you could enjoy the view by leaving the door open. Now though you’ll have to admire away before and after, rather than during.

And let’s hope book lovers will not enter as you go about your business!

Dolly and the teaspoons

I find it hard not to like Dolly Parton.

First, though, over to Sölvesborg in the southeastern corner of Sweden. According to Teskedsorden – which basically is an organisation that wants to do good things, even if it is a teaspoonful at a time – the political parties on the right came up with the idea of saving money by not letting its libraries order books in the many mother-tongues of the town.

In fairness, I have to say I’ve not been able to find out whether this decision was carried through, and many people doubted the legality of it all. But to go against the knowledge that letting children read in their first language as well as in Swedish benefits them in how well they will do in life, is plain wrong.

Then we come to Dolly. To stop the high school dropout rate in her Tennessee home town, she essentially bribed the fifth and sixth graders (in 1990) to complete high school. They were to pick a buddy, and if both of the children graduated high school she’d pay them $500. It worked. It still works, apparently.

The next thing she did was to pay for teaching assistants in every first grade for two years, with an agreement that the school system would continue with this if successful.

And then Dolly founded the Imagination Library (in 1995), sending a book every month to every child in her home county of Sevier from when they were born until they started kindergarten. This has now spread to all of the US and to Australia, Canada and the UK.

That’s more than 100 million books, from the child of a man who couldn’t read or write.

Launching When We Get To the Island

When he discovered he was wanted to drive me to Alex Nye’s book launch last night, the Resident IT Consultant spent the afternoon reading her book, When We Get To the Island. And as he said, it’s very Thirty-Nine Steps and a bit James Bond and quite exciting.

It was a successful evening. The librarians kept carrying in more chairs, and then some more, and offering tea because it was such a wet and stormy night, as well as the wine and crisps. They have a nice library in Dunblane. And enough chairs, eventually…

Alex started by telling us a bit about the background to the book, the refugees being smuggled into the country, and the state of being a ‘looked after’ child in foster care. She read an excerpt from the last bit of the train journey, only partially insulting the Duke of Sutherland. (Not much at all, really.)

Talking about the petrochemical industry near ‘Grangefield’ her dog worriedly joined in. I had thought the ‘carrot topping’ business in the story somewhat farfetched, but it seems Alex has experience of this herself, including the dangers of trying to cut semi-frozen carrots with a sharp knife.

She had had some difficulty seeing a happy ending to a book about trafficking and fostering, which both the Resident IT Consultant and the Nye dog loudly agreed with. Here Alex’s publisher Clare pointed out that it’s an exciting adventure book, and the dog on my right reckoned she was right. (She is.)

Before we were allowed to mingle again Alex read another short piece about her characters in a flooded tunnel and then she stopped right there, leaving a library full of people on a cliffhanger! They’d need to buy the book after that.

Clare Cain was selling books in a corner, but rejected the dollar bills offered by Alex’s sister who was visiting. It’s hard to remember what money goes where…

And then we gossiped a bit with Kirkland Ciccone before braving the storm to go home again.

The second leaflet

And then I found myself searching the floor plan of the Stephen A Schwarzman Building for the Mark Twain Room. When I didn’t find it, I looked again at the second library leaflet the Resident IT Consultant brought.

Ah, Mark Twain’s room would be in Buffalo. Obviously. I’m no Twain expert, but I gather he had important, if brief, ties to Buffalo.

He gave them half the manuscript of Huckleberry Finn, having lost the other half. The remaining pages were discovered in a trunk in California a hundred years later, the way things always are.

I’m neither interested nor not interested in lost manuscripts, or in Huck Finn, but it makes for fascinating reading anyway.

I began wondering what I’d think of Tom Sawyer or Huck if I were to reread them now. Are they still my kind of book, or was that mainly when I was very young, and had rather fewer books to read?

When I was eleven, I was given a prize at school, which was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in English. It was presumably because I was good at English, and it was this that was being rewarded. But I was never good enough to read Mark Twain in the original. I often thought I’d try, but never did. Besides, I’d already read the story in translation.

Which in itself helps determine at what age one used to read classics before Harry Potter. I’d not put Huckleberry Finn into the hands of a pre-eleven child today. Whether that’s wrong of me I have no idea.

Leaflets

He likes leaflets, and brings many of them home. So it’s not surprising that the Resident IT Consultant’s recent travels meant he brought quite a few of the things here, and now they sit on the dining table. He did say that he thought I’d be interested in some of them, but that after reading I could get rid of them if I wanted to.

Note that there wasn’t an option of not reading, and putting them in the recycling immediately.

I found the two library ones interesting, and far more so than the menu from the Indian restaurant in Montreal.

The Stephen A Schwarzman Building on New York’s Fifth Avenue is a lovely looking place. I’d like it even without the books, because I like buildings in general. I would love to have it as my local library.

But looking at it via the leaflet will have to do. I mostly can’t determine the scale of it. The floor plans seem modest, but then the photos of the individual rooms make them look huge, so I am guessing it’s like much in America; it’s really large.

I hope and pray it will remain a library for many years to come, even though – or do I mean especially because? – they have a real stuffed Winnie-the-Pooh.

Prepping

I do not run a library. I do not run a library. I do not run a …

Yeah, OK, there’s no need to write a hundred lines. I am a – reasonably – normal witch and I should only need to surround myself with a sensible number of my favourite books. But why is this so hard?

The last few times before Daughter has come to visit, I’ve had in mind that she could help me thin the books on the shelves in her room. The shelves with my books on them. It’s not happened. And this time I thought that someone who’s mid-pack, with a whole flat to move, might not appreciate coming to this house and being asked to shift even more unwanted stuff.

So I am approaching this task myself. Thought it’d be a nice touch if her room was nice and tidy. It won’t* be, but it’s a thought.

The purpose of owning books is not to be a library, or to be complete in any way. If I like Philip Pullman, say, there is no requirement for me to have every book he’s ever had published. I could own some of his books, and then part with a few if I reckon I’m unlikely to re-read them. Even Pullman-books aren’t guaranteed a second reading.

And of course I’m not a library. I hate lending books. So why do I believe I ought to be equipped in case someone is interested in borrowing one of my Pullmans? People don’t [always] return borrowed books. So if you wanted to borrow his Clockwork, you can’t. Partly because I don’t lend, as I said, and partly because someone borrowed it and ‘forgot’ to return it, so I don’t have Clockwork any longer.

On that basis I am now clearing out books that even I am surprised by. I am choosing some books I really love, because I probably won’t read them again, and I’ve discovered someone who would be just right for these books.

It’s time to let go.

(The above is a historical photo, before things got out of control.)

*Partly because the bathroom is being re-done and those bottles of shampoo and  toilet cleaner had to go somewhere…