My favourite library is being transformed into a beacon of naffness
Germaine Greer writing in The Guardian, Monday 4 January 2010

Fine just the way it is ... Cambridge University Library. Photograph: Jeffrey Blackler/Alamy

Cambridge University Library, which turned 75 in October last year, is probably the ugliest building in Cambridge, but those of us who regularly use it love it very much. To us, its undeniable ugliness is as irrelevant as the warts on the face of a beloved mother. It may have fewer early-printed books than the British Library, and fewer literary manuscripts than the Bodleian in Oxford, but it is far better run than either. Readers are allowed to search for their books in the stacks, which does not mean that the entire collection is mis-shelved – only that you have a better chance of ending up with the book you're looking for than in either of the other institutions. For those of us who have the right to enjoy it, the library is heaven on earth.

The building was designed by Giles Gilbert Scott in the rationalist-fascist style of the mid-1930s. Its most conspicuous feature is a blunt tower, visible for many miles – even from the M11 – making it a far more significant identifier of Cambridge than King's College Chapel (though you won't find the tower on too many tea towels). It stands 12 storeys high; the rest of the original library stands at six. As the tower often has a plume of steam emerging from it, the whole structure has the air of a place where books are burned rather than read. The building is built around two internal courtyards, like prison yards, which cannot be accessed from outside; the entrance facade stands atop an intimidating flight of stairs.

Whatever else you say about the library, you must confess that it is bold. But this boldness is now being vitiated by endless rather ordinary accretions. The least impressive of these was unveiled last September, and consists of 14 bollards that block off the approach to the library steps. Although this seems in part intended as a means of reducing parking space, it is an installation: 1% of the library's budget has to be spent on public art (as outlined in the Per Cent for Art scheme, monitored by Arts Council England).

The bollards are bronze, in the form of columnar piles of books. Imagine the library built like a fortress to safeguard our intellectual inheritance, and outside it piles of apparently rejected books. The idea is not so much shocking as humiliatingly naff. Ten of the columns are fixed, but in four the individual books can be made to rotate. If you line them up right, you get the words "Ex Libris", the name of the sculpture, which according to the artist (a local man, Harry Gray) is "a metaphor for the library itself; you can't just look at the books, you have to use them to gain understanding, to get the bigger picture". Gray appears not to know that Ex Libris is also the name of the best-known purveyors of electronic library resources, now guaranteed free advertising in perpetuity.
Read Germaine Greer's full piece at The Guardian online.