A circulating library in a town is an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge! It blossoms
through the year.
— Richard Brinkley Sheridan
The first library I ever saw was less than 20 feet long and sat on four wheels.
It was a bus — a bookmobile, we called it. We lived in the sticks with no municipal buildings whatsoever, never mind a library.
So the elders spoke and decreed that once a week, for two hours at a time, the library would come to us.
As I recall, you entered at the back door of the bookmobile, browsed your way through a narrow corridor surrounded by hundreds of books and emerged, with your selections duly noted and stamped, by the front door.
Seems almost Dickensian now, traipsing to a book wagon at a crossroads to pick up your weekly supply of reading material.
Today, the land is festooned with free and public libraries that border on the palatial.
Heck, you don’t even have to put your shoes on — you can order books on the Internet; even download entire texts to your e-book or iPad.
I’m not the only one who’s noticed. Two independent bookstores in my town have closed this year.
Libraries are adjusting to the new reality as well. Recently in the magazine The Walrus, Michael Harris wrote of his visit to the brand new City Centre Library in Surrey, B.C.
It’s surprising the word ‘library’ made it into the name of the structure. The building features a café, a recreation centre for kids, a plethora of ‘interactive’ sculpture and furniture – and oh, yeah – books too.
A ‘librarian’ at the centre explained to Harris that “Our jobs are becoming more about helping newcomers with their language skills, or helping people access government services… we’re kind of social workers, actually.” Harris even interviewed the architect of the new multi-million-dollar City Centre Library. He notes that in their conversation about the architect’s motivation and vision for the structure, ‘books’ were not mentioned once.
That’s the trouble with books — they refuse to go faster. The opening chapter of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities consists of one magnificent cathedral of a sentence that runs to 120 words. We live in a time that embraces Twitter, a communications device that allows only 140 characters.
Not surprising that our libraries — as book repositories — are under siege.
But we need to be careful about that.
Back in 642 Moslem armies overran the city of Alexandria in Egypt capturing, among other things, the most famous and extensive library in the world.
The story goes that the victorious general asked what was to be done with the books therein. His superior, a Caliph named Omar, replied:
“If the writings of the Greeks agree with the Koran they are superfluous and need not be preserved; if they disagree they are pernicious and ought not to be preserved.”
The manuscripts — containing all the written knowledge of the ancient world — were consigned to be used as fuel to heat the public baths.
It is said that they kept the furnaces blazing for six months.
— Arthur Black is an author and humour
columnist. He lives on Salt Spring Island.
