Wednesday, November 02, 2011

Sad

It did rain last Thursday. I didn't go to the site. No point. In fact it's been chucking it down for most of the time since then.

I got lucky though. I got a phone call around 10.30 Thursday morning, from a bloke I used to work with 3 or 4 years ago, asking if I was available for a couple of days for a demo job, £8 an hour. Nothing difficult - just a straight-forward pre-fab, concrete slab, single storey, building. I said yes, of course. Demolition work isn't affected by rain. Pre-fab concrete panels are easy to remove (or destroy) with hand-tools like a wrecking-bar, or a pick-axe, and £8 an hour for labouring isn't a bad rate.

He said he'd pick me up in the van, it wasn't far, just across the river, on the other side of the city. When we got there and I saw what the building was that we were demolishing I was gutted.

It was the branch library.

Government cutbacks (our current right-wing government delights in destroying public services and cutting facilities for the less-than-wealthy, whilst trying to reduce taxes for their right corporation friends - who actually pay next-to-no-tax anyway) are causing a great many local branch libraries (and day centres, and youth clubs, etc. to close). It's a short-sighted policy. And it borders on criminal.

My uncle taught me to read before I was old enough to go to school. And he introduced me to libraries. (And eventually second-hand bookshops). We didn't have a lot of money when I was a kid. I couldn't buy new books. Libraries were magic. I spent hours in them. And the librarian at my little branch library was a star. She realised she'd got a budding bibliophile on her hands, even at age six, and she encouraged me. I don't even know what her name was. She was just "the librarian" or "Miss". But I owe her a great deal. She guided my reading and book-borrowing. I don't mean she censored it. Looking back she obviously felt that, as long as a child was old enough to read it then they were mature enough to read it.

No, what I mean is she encouraged me, she gradually introduced me to more and more writers, to more complex stories, to adult books that were suitable. She got me reading things that most kids wouldn't. Or didn't have a chance to read. Eight years old and reading Conan Doyle. Ten and reading Jane Austen, Shakespeare, and Walter Scott. She helped me see the world. She helped me find escape (from a pretty awful childhood) in fantastic books full of wonderful tales.

I love books. I love to read. And it saddens me that it just became a little bit more difficult for local kids to find the same sense of wonder I found when I first read The Count of Monte Cristo, or Ivanhoe.

It made me think of some ranting I've seen online lately. About e-books. And people who really support them dancing in glee and proclaiming the end of print. They're wrong. Print won't die. Print can't be allowed to die.

Now my feelings about Kindle and the like have been stated here before. But this is slightly different.

You see, those people claiming the ebooks are the future (and they may well supersede print - but not in my lifetime) and trumpeting Amazon sales figures are forgetting a number of things. They're forgetting that e-readers are the toys of the reasonably well-off. They're forgetting that an online store will naturally self-select for those who are reasonably well-off. Those who can afford e-readers. And who can get online in the first place.

They forget that most of the world doesn't have access to e-readers, and smartphones, and macbooks. That vast areas of the world don't have internet service. They forget about the poor.

I can donate a few pounds to a charity and they can buy half-a-dozen books with that. And those books can be read by hundreds of children in the poorest village in the poorest country in Africa. And no ebook can do that.

And that isn't even considering the kids in developed nations who are too poor to buy Kindles, and smartphones, and macbooks. The kids who need those libraries full of printed books. Because libraries are freedom. libraries are knowledge. Libraries are magic.

And it breaks my heart that I've spent the past four work-days demolishing a little piece of that magic and making it a little more difficult for some other kid to find the world of books.

Treasure your libraries and bookshops folks. The world is a poorer place without them

Goodnight and may your God/s go with you.

Ze

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1 comment:

Tamara said...

I wish people would get more angry about the fact that cutbacks/austerity measures really only hurt those of us who aren't wealthy.

And why in the world would anyone express glee at the demise of print? What's wrong with having all formats available?

I know many comic companies would love to sell more digitally. I can't bring myself to collect comics that I can't touch and smell.

7:52 PM

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