In an over-crowded, muzak-infested world, reading rooms are an oasis
Germaine Greer guardian.co.uk, Sunday 5 September 2010

Do you have any Danielle Steele? . . . Duke Humfrey’s Library at the Bodleian in Oxford Photograph: John Downing/Rex


Reports that library services will be cut have been met with orchestrated outcry. The Department of Culture, Media and Sport softened us up for the bad news by revealing that the "proportion of adults visiting a library" had decreased from 48.2% to 39.4% in the four years to 2010. What they didn't say was how many non-adult people had begun to use libraries and what kind of effect that might have been having on adults in search of a quiet read.

Most of the discussion assumed that lending books was what libraries are for. This is so much not the case; some of the finest libraries in the world chain their books to their reading desks. The public lending library is a recent invention, a response to the spread of literacy to the working classes who had neither money to buy books nor space to store them. A library or bibliotheque (the word is derived from the Greek for bookshelf) is first and foremost a place to keep texts, whether written on papyrus, vellum or paper. It is, secondarily, a place to read them. The Royal Library of Alexandria had, besides bookshelves, a loggia, where readers could walk to uncramp their stiffened limbs, and a cafeteria, as well as an acquisitions and cataloguing department, and most university libraries today follow a similar plan.

Ed Vaizey, minister for culture, has implored us to think of libraries as a cluster of services rather than as buildings, which is fair enough, but libraries are also houses for books and documents; as such they are some of the most beautiful built spaces on earth. The original Bodleian is now much too small to serve the needs of Oxford University, but any suggestion that it should be sold off to finance hi-tech library services within the university would be resisted angrily by all those people who have ever passed through the Schools Quadrangle. There are more comfortable places to read than Duke Humfrey's Library, but none more atmospheric or thrilling. When I give my bag to the concierge and trot up the stone stairs, I get the same feeling as a football fan heading for the turnstiles.

Read her full piece at The Guardian.