Lost Libraries
Will
this era be remembered in the future as the time of the lost libraries?
The
death and closure and breaking down, falling-apart and becoming-something-new
of the library, the bookshop, the very book itself, are constituents of our
times. Squatters are running public libraries, people write angry and anguished
letters to the press on the closure of local libraries and the discarding and
pulping of library books. We talk about the death of the book; passion for the
old intimacy of the paper book tempered by pragmatic leanings toward the
convenience of the e-reader.
“Lost
libraries” evokes images of Alexandria
burning, the Nazi confiscations. From the libraries lost from ancient, pillaged
monasteries to our own lost libraries; the forgotten books of our childhood or
the ones given away in later nomadic wanderings between cities and jobs and
broken loves.
Lost
Libraries. The old, hushed, wood panelled space, the dusty, pungent smell of
old paper. The visual and tactile things of the library; tickets and stamps and
plastic covers, bent and peeling. Something of tweed and people wearing
glasses, of rattling trolleys and Dewey’s abstruse ordering.
This
will be gone.
Libraries will embrace change and
the future; the e-book and the computer. And maybe that is right. Maybe that is
imperative to the survival of the library. So in the space of the new,
gleaming, efficient library, with its self-service kiosks and its café and lively
chatter, there is a ghost, many ghosts, the ghosts inside our own heads, those
of us old enough to remember or those who know their history, of the lost
library.
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