Apparently it is 'Love Libraries' month in the US, and Danielle has been celebrating with a couple of themed posts over at A Work in Progress. I'm not sure the message has found its way over to the UK just yet - where book-lending services seem to be somewhat out of fashion - but I'm in support of anything that advertises and emphasises the incredible importance of local libraries. (Safe to say the library to the left is not my local library, but the library of my alma mater, St. Andrews.)
When I was a child we had very few books in our house. My parents have never been big readers and, as far as I remember, they didn't make a big deal of reading to me when I was a child. I remember reading my school books to them, like a good girl, and then I remember them taking me to the city library, probably from the age of about 6 or 7. They must have been encouraged to do so by my voracious appetite for books, but I don't recall asking to go. It became a regular fixture of our week: Monday nights when the library opened late my mum and I would drive to town, and I would wander around the children's section for half an hour choosing my quota of 6 items. (I rarely read all six in the week but then, as now, I found it impossible to resist the allure of 'new' books.) I remember those Mondays as the most contented evenings of my childhood. In celebration of them, I've stolen (parts of) Danielle's library meme.
What is the most number of books you've ever had checked out at one time?
Too many! My local library allows me to check out 20 items at a time, and now and then I've been up to my quota, mostly around the time of the Orange and Booker prize long list announcements. I also tend to have half a dozen or so things on hold at any one time. Of course this isn't counting the number of books I routinely check out from the university library I work next door to - at the moment I have 17 and that's quite tame. When I was a child I always had my card maxed out.
What is the biggest fine you've ever had?
I once forgot to return a short loan book when I was an undergraduate at St. Andrews and had to pay a whopping fine. I took the book out in the early afternoon and was meant to return it within 4 hours; I sat and read it in the library for a while, then rushed off to a lecture, slinging it in my bag and forgetting all about it. I found it later that evening when I was back at my hall, and a 20 minute walk from town. It was my first year and I was naive - how bad could it be? So I held on to it till morning and returned it then. The fine was £15. 50p for every half hour it had been late. Eep.
When you go to the library, do you plan ahead and make a list? Or do you browse?
I try very hard not to go to the public library unless I have a specific reason, like a hold to collect, or if I have a book in mind. Otherwise I end up coming home with half a dozen things that I'll never read, and that I'll keep renewing for months and months until they can be renewed no more, at which point I'll have to cart them all back again. Still, I will usually browse at least the new books once I'm there. Thankfully the library doesn't get too many copies of new releases and so they're very rarely on the shelf. No doubt this has saved me from hulking home countless tomes of contemporary fiction that I have no time for.
Have you ever been shushed by a librarian?
Not really, although a fellow student once told me off for talking on my mobile phone. I know, I know, cardinal sin. But it was late at night, she and I were the only people about, and in the middle of typing up an essay my computer had reformatted the whole thing. I was only calling a friend for help...
These days public libraries aren't very quiet places anyway. Mine is full of computers and the interminable noise of 30 keyboard click-clacking in unison. Not to mention the whush of the coffee machine, and the photocopiers, and the fax machines, and the dozen children windmilling around the place.
What is the worst (against-the-rules) thing you've ever done in the library?
To be honest I'm not very good at breaking rules - I fret, and fret, and fret too much to pull it off. But when I was an MA student I did once 'hide' an overnight-loan library book in my study carrell (a carrell is basically an office in the library - a private room with a desk and shelves that postgraduates can rent for the year). I didn't check it out, so it didn't show up on the catalogue, and I knew that other people from my course would be looking for it. But I wanted to finish it before it inevitably disappeared and I didn't have time that evening, so... It was very bad and I felt terrible about it the next day. It just goes to show the depths to which success-hungry students will go.
Then again, and if rumours are to be believed, it wasn't the worst sin committed in a study carrell. St. Andrews library shut theirs down because of students getting frisky over their notes.
What's the worst thing you've ever done to a library book?
I must admit that I have occasionally made underlinings in academic books, mostly absent-mindedly, and once I wrote a disparaging comment in the margin of a particularly silly paper. All in pencil, of course.
Have you ever had a "favorite" librarian?
Yes, most definitely, and I think I've mentioned her here before. Pam was the librarian at a local village library, which was nothing more than a port-a-cabin in the community hall carpark, and she steered my reading all through my teenage years. My mum and I first started visiting there when the town library closed for renovation and, despite the reduced choice and opening hours, we never looked back. Pam was a retired school teacher, with a passion for books, and an eclectic taste in fiction. Although she was restricted in the types of books she could hold - romances and westerns were the order of the day with many regulars - she tried her best to keep small selections of contemporary and genre fictions on constant rotation. After a few visits she became my guide to all things literary, helping me to choose what I should read from what she knew of my likes and dislikes, and pushing me to read new things. The first fantasy book and the first science fiction book I ever read came recommended by Pam; similarly my first Classics, and my first adult contemporary fiction. Now it's true that she also passed me lots of historical pulp, the likes of Jean Plaidy and Elizabeth Chadwick, but I loved all that stuff and it was right for me at the time. From her I learned to read with an entirely open mind and for the sheer joy of it. I will always remember her with incredibly fondness.
If you could change one thing about your library it would be...
More books! My library recently purged hundreds of books to make way for a huge computer suite in the centre of the non-fiction room, which made me very sad. I understand that libraries have to provide other services as well as book lending, and that the only reason a lot of people go is to use the internet, which is a vital community resource. But. But I wish these changes weren't made at the expense of the books. I wish councils would create new centres for technology services, and fill their libraries with lots of new books instead. I don't know how many times I've searched the catalogue for a popular non-fiction book that hasn't been available - dozens at least - and I'm sorry that it is these books, the most expensive and least likely bought, that are thrust aside for the computers. Throughout the UK libraries have purged over 15 million books from their collections in the last decade. They have been replaced by only 1.5 million new books, which is hardly any if you divide it by the number of libraries there are and compare it with the dozens of books being published every year. Tis a mighty shame.
~~Victoria~~