Seven things I’ll miss about the traditional library

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/22/seven-things-miss-traditional-library

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Last week it was suggested that in order to bring libraries into the modern era, visitors should be cossetted with new-fangled indulgences such as heating, toilets, WiFi and coffee machines. For those so decimated by web culture and capitalism that they can’t read a sentence without wanting to get up and spend some money, there could even be the possibility of combining libraries with “retail space”.

Well, I don’t want to see a branch of Paperchase thrown up between the bookshelves and the traditional rack of filthy old CDs. If we’re going to keep local libraries they need to stand for something from before the time when every square inch of public space could be monetised. If libraries were to change, this is what I’d really miss.

1. Vintage textures

Only in public libraries will you find that particular blend of colours and surfaces that bitterly recall the aesthetic sins of days past, specifically the era stretching from the 1940s to the 1970s. I’m thinking of tightly woven synthetic navy blue carpet tilex, hollow white polystyrene ceiling squares, the orangey pine front counter with full gloss varnish, laminated signs, Bisto-brown formica stackable tables, thick-ribbed radiators painted the muddy industrial green of borstals, and shelving built from clanging beige Meccano. Heaven.

2. Microfiche

Nothing makes me feel more like Kate Winslet pretending to be an Enigma codebreaker than putting my face to the (again, beige) metal lens of a microfiche reader and cracking my way through 500 old copies of the Haringey Gazette. If you sleuth hard enough, you’re almost definitely (not) going to stumble across a Suspicions of Mr Whicher-style parish murder mystery.

3. Sexual frisson

I mainly used my local library, before I reached my teenage years, to read through every single book in the Anne of Green Gables, What Katy Did, Nancy Drew, Sweet Valley High and Chalet School series. But there is no doubt that for older library users silent flirting has always been a draw: eyes meet over a corkboard bearing out of date notices about karate classes and the risks of high blood pressure. Finally, you’ve found another bookworm – and you can judge them by what they’re reading (yes, Middlemarch; no, Ayn Rand). In the non-library world you’re meant to unpin your hair, remove your spectacles and it’s all, “Ooh, Miss Jones, you’re so beautiful without your glasses”. But in the library world bifocals are the erotic equivalent of latex thigh-highs and a riding crop. Keep them on.

4. 19th-century methods

Computerised tracking systems have been super for the global economy, but I’m nostalgic for the apothecary-style wooden cabinets that held little alphabetised and numbered cards with the code for each book written in actual pen by actual hand. Or, better yet, stamped with a rubber stamp on an ink pad that needed to be spat on to get started.

5. Silence

Silence is the sign of a library’s success and a shop’s failure. Local libraries are probably the only secular gathering place where you’re not required to browse, buy, eat or drink in order to justify your presence. It’s the only place where silence is mandatory and generalised rather than an accidental moment in-between bursts of activity, and it requires great skills of concentration and inner stillness to develop the wherewithal to take your book or your work to a library table and sit down and study without surfing the web, shooting off a text or gabbling about nothing to your friends. Silence is a skill we’re in danger of losing, and libraries provide it with a lot less of the insufferable smugness of churches and vegan meditation retreats.

6. Librarians

Librarians would prefer it if libraries had no people in them mucking things up; then they could just walk along the aisles alphabetising everything and dusting book spines. They have developed a higher consciousness, hyper-sensitive to specks of dust, sounds and movements well beyond the normal range of human cognisance. Should we speak in the no-speaky zone, we will be punished. Should we be late giving back that copy of Madhur Jaffrey’s classic Indian recipes, we will be penalised. If the photocopier is malfunctioning they will sigh heavily and imply that we have somehow sabotaged its workings. They might sometimes seem petty and insular, but where would we be without librarians’ moral certainty and exceptional dress sense? Any combination of taut and ropy tweed, plastic pastel beads, glasses on a chain, frosted Angel Delight hair, blue eyeliner, high collared nylon blouses, comfortably soled shoes and flesh toned hosiery will do.

7. Books

Functioning exactly like medieval tapestries, these are jolly colourful and keep a room warm in winter. If traditional libraries were to close I would, on reflection, really miss the books.