Town Mouse

Read all about it – in silence, please

tom hodgkinson

The Beano comic has just launched a scheme called Libraries Aloud. The idea is to get device-addicted kids going back to libraries by allowing noisy readings of books out loud.

Town Mouse has absolutely nothing against reading out loud to children, or indeed children in libraries. But libraries are not the place for raised voices, tumult and bustle.

If I arrived at the Reading Room of the British Library and quietly got out my books, only to be disturbed by a group of small children shouting, ‘Behind you!’, I would be rather annoyed. I’d hope a librarian would stare down the kids and hiss, ‘Shush!’ at them.

Libraries and a deathly hush go together like a horse and carriage. When I was a small Town Mouse, my mother would take us to the children’s library in Richmond. There was red lino on the stairs, a parquet floor in the library, a strong smell of wood polish and fearsome librarians who would stamp your books. I remember gazing at the stamps with as much fascination as I read the Thomas the Tank Engine hardbacks we took out. We learned how to shut up – a useful skill in life.

Later, when I was a teenager, studying for O and A levels, I’d sit and work in the grown-ups’ section of the library. Libraries continued to be my friend during university – a sanctuary of calm, built for study, free from distractions. More recently, I’ve written whole books in libraries.

But something has happened to them recently. From slightly scary centres of learning and monastic retreats from the bustle of the world, they morphed into bold, bright community centres.

My local west London library in Shepherd’s Bush – which, with some hubris, describes itself as ‘one of the most exciting and innovative libraries in the country’ – is a hideous, glass-sided repository of about 14 paperback books, with not a wooden shelf in sight. It embarrassingly describes itself as ‘a place to study, surf, relax and have fun’ but its main use seems to be as a collection point of those see-though plastic bags for recycling. It also offers free internet and boasts the following facilities: ‘Public toilets and baby-changing facilities, food bin to collect donated, tinned and dried goods for redistribution through the Hammersmith & Fulham foodbank, small electrical recycling bin, small batteries’ recycling tubes, small lightbulb recycling box and Amazon locker’.

There’s nothing wrong with a community centre. It just isn’t the same thing as a library. Providing an Amazon locker is feeding the hand that has completely destroyed you: citizens today are encouraged to buy cheap paperbacks via Jeff Bezos’s retail monopoly rather than do the eco thing and use a library.

Libraries started off as ecclesiastical institutions run by monasteries. Posh people also had private libraries. Then the do-gooding Victorians, lovers of improvements of all kinds, opened them up to the public. Hence working-class education, DH Lawrence, miners’ libraries and the line from Britpop band Manic Street Preachers ‘Libraries gave us power’.

The library as we know it really started in 1850 with the Public Libraries Act. This allowed boroughs to use public funds to establish libraries. Winchester was the first town to open a library of this sort, closely followed by Norwich.

The library boom did not really gather steam till the 1890s, when businessmen such as Henry Tate, Andrew Carnegie and newspaper magnate John Passmore Edwards endowed new libraries.

Tate was perhaps feeling a tiny bit guilty about rotting everyone’s teeth with his processed sugars. Bertrand Russell snobbishly said of him, ‘Now we have the spectacle of people like Henry Tate “going in for a bit of culture”.’ Rather in the same way, gangster Tommy Shelby, in the new series of Peaky Blinders, set in the 1930s, put his name on the front door of a worthy institution, a free hospital.

The money may or may not have been ill-gotten. But the results of this philanthropy were laudable: by 1914, 60 per cent of the population has access to a public library.

As for today’s libraries, there are some old-school examples left in London. My favourite is the Marx Memorial Library on Clerkenwell Green in central London. It retains something of the red-lino-andwood-polish vibe of the Richmond Library, having been thankfully unmodernised. It’s jam-packed with left-wing books and brings researchers from all over the world for its collection of Spanish Civil War-related titles. It boasts a function room with a banner made by William Morris that reads ‘Hammersmith Socialist League’. There’s also a kitchen and a tiny study where Lenin worked on his newspaper, the Spark.

Sadly the library receives no public funding. And today’s Tates and Carnegies are unlikely to support its efforts to promote the interests of labour against capital. Still, you can help them. An annual membership costs a mere £25 – and you can guarantee there’ll be no gaggles of screaming kids.