An axe to the root of our culture
15 December 2001
Julia Lewis
“Are you sure you really want to sell these?” I asked the librarian, having picked out The Darling Buds of May, a George Eliot and two Oxford University Press Dickens novels, all in immaculate order, which I was about to buy for less than 50p each. It seemed odd that a library should be almost giving away good-quality books, especially as Merton, like other London boroughs, was desperately short of cash.
That tiny sale was nothing to what followed. At Raynes Park and Wimbledon libraries, rooms have been set aside for tables stacked high with hundreds of books of every description, and underneath are yet more volumes crammed into boxes. Art books, children’s encyclopaedias, botanical books, science books, countless classics and modern works of fiction, most in excellent condition and all at ludicrously low prices.
People have come away from sales laden with bagfuls of books, and there are more sales to come. Every local authority is at it. Wandsworth admits it is pulping books it cannot sell. The shelves must be cleared to make way for new, different titles, and it’s all because of the government’s Public Library Standards, issued earlier this year, which require that libraries “meet the needs” of the communities they serve and that book stocks be “up to date and attractive”.
Each local authority has been given 8.5 years in which to replenish its entire stock. Councils have to submit a “library plan” to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport each year, outlining their objectives and the “services” they intend to deliver. There is even to be a “Best Value” inspection every year to ensure each authority meets local “targets” for services to children, the socially excluded, ethnic-minority communities and people with disabilities.
“The targets are to make sure that libraries are vibrant and attract people to them. We want authorities to provide choice in books and to meet the needs of users,” a Department of Culture, Media and Sport spokeswoman told me.
David Blunkett has just called for immigrants to learn English and make an effort to integrate themselves into the life and customs of this country. If he wants them to get to know our culture and if he wants English to become a unifying force, he should perhaps take a look at his government’s library policy. It is dividing the population, rather than uniting us, because its emphasis is on buying in books in other languages and supplying each community with its own selection. The government is taking an axe to the roots of our culture.
Among the books being thrown out are those that represent the best of English and American writing, as well as translations of European classics and works by contemporary authors. By the end of the year, Merton council says it will have got rid of around 30,000 books to make space on the shelves for the new titles that it is now required to buy. To meet the government’s deadline, it must continue to sell off books at an even greater rate.
Most of what is worth reading has disappeared from the shelves of my local library, and the choice has been diminished, not enhanced. It’s heartbreaking. Obviously a certain amount needs to be thrown out each year and new stock bought, but in these days of shrinking budgets and a looming recession such a large-scale purge seems appallingly wasteful.
One of the criteria being used to decide whether to “withdraw” a book is how often it is borrowed. The quality of the book doesn’t enter into it. The Library Association told me it was a “commercial decision”, similar to those made by Waterstone’s or Blockbusters.
It is also up to each local authority to keep the kind of books it believes each community needs, which may explain why I can no longer find anything I want to read at my local library. Colliers Wood is considered a “deprived” area, unlike predominantly middle-class Wimbledon, which is why it has been designated a “different” selection of books.
I went to Merton council to meet Labour councillor Karl Carter and John Pateman, head of libraries, who informed me that my library was one of their success stories, now that a new manager had “changed” the stock. Mr Pateman, who spoke of “moving away from the classics” and of not wanting to “lose” black or working-class people, stressed the difficulty of trying to cater for such a wide range of tastes, adding, “We try to get it right as often as we can, for as many people as we can.” They assured me that a copy of any book could always be obtained through the library computers. But this assumes that you know what you are looking for in the first place.
It is a long way from the idealism that lay behind the desire of Victorian philanthropists such as Andrew Carnegie, who aimed to help poorer people educate themselves by supplying them with a library full of good books, not a dumbed-down selection.
Concerned about what was actually left, I decided to do a survey at my library, the Donald Hope, with the help of a book bought at one of the library sales - 100 Great Books: Masterpieces of All Time. The library computer revealed just seven of these books. It registered a zero when I typed in Aristotle’s Ethics or Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population - hardly surprising. But no Pride and Prejudice, Robinson Crusoe, Madame Bovary, Brave New World or War and Peace?
The library itself contained a range of videos, including recent feature films and some popular television dramas. There was also a small assortment of “Indic” and Chinese videos. On the main counter stood a revolving stand, with “ReadySpex” reading glasses for sale. The shelves containing books in English were packed with light fiction, with the odd classic or more demanding work dotted about here and there. There were several stands of paperbacks, one filled with Mills & Boon novels, but hardly a worthwhile modern writer to be seen among them. The non-fiction sections contained countless health books but almost nothing on history, science and maths. The “English Literature” stock was a mere handful of volumes.
My heart sank at a display of recently acquired stock, which included a book on gluten-free cooking, one on beauty and make-up, guides to Lisbon and Brittany, the latest Danielle Steel and something called The Livewire Book of British Women Achievers.
Since 20 per cent of Merton’s population is made up of ethnic minorities, that percentage of its library budget is spent catering for those communities; hence the sections in the four main languages spoken in Merton: Bengali, Punjabi, Urdu and Tamil, and the black section.
Lewisham council predicts that by the year 2011 its black and minority ethnic communities are likely to form almost the majority of its population. It says pupils in its schools speak 141 languages, with 40 languages being spoken by “sizable communities” in the borough. Don’t these figures present a compelling enough reason for libraries to encourage the use of English and unify our fragmented population, rather than trying to cater for so many different groups? And why is there the extraordinary assumption that people only want to read authors from their own ethnic or social background?
Was I looking at things from too white and middle-aged a standpoint? My younger, black friend, Novelette Stewart, didn’t think so. She was happy to hear that the black writer Zora Neale Hurston came up on the computer, but saddened that only one book by William Saroyan appeared and that was in Urdu. Her other favourite classics, such as Aristophanes, The Birds and Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, just weren’t there.
“It is incredibly patronising. A person’s socio-economic condition does not in any way dictate what their interests will be with regard to literature. It is terrible to get rid of books, and once they have gone you can never get them back. The question is: is an author worthwhile? Should it not be the quality of the work rather than the demand?”
While Ms Stewart sees a need for black sections, she believes every library should stock as wide a selection of books as possible in English classics, modern classics, contemporary writers, light fiction, history, science and maths books. Good writing, she believes, has a universal appeal.
“There is a point to be made about cultural heritage, too. If you are in England, the dominant culture has to be English. There are a lot of double standards here.”
Ms Stewart added that Sygy, her ten-year-old daughter, whose favourite poems are The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and The Lady of Shalott, has given up on her local library in Clapham because she no longer finds “anything interesting” there.
The government’s policy is well-meaning but misguided. Publishers must be rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of all those library bookshelves waiting to be filled.
Meanwhile, lovers of English literature may do better on the other side of the Channel. In a recent edition of the Oldie, Wilfred De’ath writes of his delight at finding a complete set of the novels of Elizabeth Bowen in a French provincial library. Would it still be possible to find such a thing in the English equivalent?