Off the shelf

Steve, a fellow blogger from Brighton, does not much like his new prize-winning, privately funded, public library.

Although the latest architectural addition to the sea-front there has "low energy consumption and a 50% reduction in carbon emissions";  and although the new blue-tiled, glass-fronted Jubilee Library "relies on local climatic conditions and can recycle rainwater",  Steve finds it somewhat weak in the books area.

He comments sadly on my blog about Candida Hofer's new book of photographs taken in great international libraries from New York to Prague. (See The Secret Miracle on January 23, below.)

Steve's objection is not only that I was unreasonably fortunate ("lucky him", he says) to get a copy of Hofer for Christmas but that I had reminded him of all the "bindings, shelves and desks from different libraries around the world" which were beyond his travelling range.

"Floor to ceiling shelves of books! Take a photograph of the library I have to use - grateful though I am for its small mercies - and you'd struggle to find an angle with one flamin' book in sight".

Modern library practices are a common subject of complaint in the TLS, both from our own critics and the readers who write to us. Computers are fine, all say, but in a library they ought not to be king.

Books may be inefficient - but they have effected quite alot in the last 2000 years. There is a nagging worry at what happens when the page is merely something that appears on a screen.

I am not sure who is right. Blogging about books, rather than about television of religion, is a task that raises the question almost every day.

Next time I'm in Brighton, I will drop by at the Jubilee to see Steve's place for myself. Perhaps during one of our seaside party political conferences - when even a few shelves of solid facts and semi-literate fiction might be a welcome refuge for a blogger.

And a safe one too - for anyone who doesn't want their absence from the frenzied fray to be noticed.

During our leaders' speeches I have often found a fellow renegade from rhetorical excess at a bar on the pier or in a back-street antique-shop, but hardly ever in a place where books are borrowed and lent.

Libraries, with books on shelves and cards in index boxes, are just not what political types like.

Which is one reason - though maybe not the only one - why they are so happy to turn them into rain-water collecting, carbon-efficient examples of a public-private financial initiative.

Comments

[Chuck Unsworth]

Sir Peter will be completely safe from all politicians within the ('environmentally friendly'?) walls of the new Brighton library - or any library come to that. Most of the current crop of political leaders appear never to have read any history and/or most other books. Even decent fiction seems to have passed them by, although some have perpetrated fairly indecent novels.

As to the building itself, well how many architects actually read anything except entry forms for the various glittering prizes? Form and function seem to completely off their radar.

Steve has my sympathies, but it's the writing on the wall, I'm afraid......

[Mark Thwaite]

Peter, I think it is worth noting, too, that Steve, your fellow Brighton-based blogger, is also one of the very, very finest literary bloggers in the UK, if not on the whole of the internet.