While the book industry has sunk deeper and deeper into the thrall of celebrity culture, there has always been one institution representing the literary aspirations of the nation. The British Library is a bastion of culture and a seemingly anachronistic shrine to the written word. Last week, however, saw the announcement of possible funding cuts for the home of many of the world’s priceless literary relics.
Chief Executive of the library, Lynne Brindley, was told earlier this year that the institution faced a 5-7% cut in its annual £100m budget. Brindley explained that ‘substantial cuts would restrict access to our collections as reading rooms reduced their opening hours and imposed charges for services that are currently free to users’. This week she made an impassioned statement to the Observer exhorting the government to protect what she describes as ‘the mind and memory of the nation’.
While the plans have met with uproar from a host of British Library members as diverse as Michael Palin, Andrew Motion and the director general of the CBI, the reduction in funding reflects a trend in attitudes towards libraries across the UK. Our failure, as a nation, to engage with the importance of libraries has left the British trailing behind eastern countries, such as China, Korea and Japan. There, Brindley explains, money is being poured into digital development and new buildings. As she points out ‘they understand the importance of libraries in the 21st century’.
It is interesting to consider that, while local libraries have sunk from favour through being considered old fashioned and out of touch, the British Library is likely to be constrained, by lack of funding, from properly fulfilling its digital, and hence its forward-looking potential. This contradiction in policy leads us to question, what is, or even, what ought to be, the role of libraries in the 21st century?
Local libraries are run like profitable companies, with any book not making a profit (i.e. not being borrowed) being axed. This has forced libraries to behave like the book industry, where it was announced, also last week, that Jodie’s Marsh’s novel, Crystal, is outselling every book on the Booker shortlist – combined. Sales potential is valued above literary merit.
So what comes and goes on a library shelf is determined by how often a book is borrowed. Guardian bloggist Shirley Dent summarises: ‘In a nutshell, the least popular books get the chop.’ This democratic system is much maligned by Dent: ‘Have you ever heard such a recipe for dumbing down? Surely there is only so much Maeve Binchy and Wilbur Smith our library shelves can hold. I am not knocking those books or the people who read them – what needs a good kick is the criminal abnegation of authority, the lack of balls to say “this is on the shelf because it is the best and it will stay there for the same reason”.’
Viewed in this light, the role of libraries would be to guide the public consciousness towards high-minded and/or classic literature. Although in principle a noble idea, wouldn’t the reality simply be that those books would sit gathering dust on the shelves? No one can force the public to read the ‘right’ kind of book, and making the library into a dictatorial regime would surely discourage potential library-goers from reading anything at all. Reducing the Maeve Binchy and Wilbur Smith content from libraries may tip the borrowing level below the minimum level, forcing the closure of libraries completely.
Surely it is better to allow people to read what they want to read. After all, one positive argument for the current trend in celebrity-led fiction is that it at least encourages what is largely a TV-viewing demographic to pick up a book and read.
The question really is why ‘literary’ books don’t get borrowed in libraries? After all, although they are admittedly trailing behind Jodie’s effort, there are hundreds of thousands of them being sold every year. The answer, possibly, lies in the power for acquisition. Those people who want to read a literary novel are more likely, it could be argued, to go out and buy the book than to borrow it.
This is entering into a tricky area in which intellectual activity is linked with wealth. A further example of this scenario is that other venerable institution The London Library. The London Library, founded in 1841 by Thomas Carlyle, is a subscription library – a private library paid for by its members who provide an annual fee. And it is thriving. As Judith Flanders explains, ‘Not only has its building in St James’s Square been expanded time and again, now more than £4m has been spent to buy the building behind so that there is room for further expansion, which is costing another £7m’.
In the case of the London Library, though, the argument becomes circular. Do people pay for the London Library because it possesses the kind of books that have long been chucked out of local libraries, so that if local libraries also contained those books more people would visit them? Or does the London Library exclude those people who would be borrowing the Maeve Binchy and Wilbur Smith books, which would otherwise proliferate there too, by magnitude of borrowings, and cause the London Library thereupon to be deserted by the outraged literati?
Flanders is a great supporter of the idea of subscription libraries. ‘The London Library has survived for nearly two centuries by sticking to the belief that people will appreciate (and pay for) a really good lending facility. The figures are there to show that others would do well to follow suit.’ She is right to commend the library for its achievements, but encouraging libraries across the nation to command fees is contrary to the laudable aim of encouraging more people, from every background, to read more.
The issue is complex, contentious and almost entirely dependent on a lack of funding that prohibits libraries from catering for everyone. The beauty of the British Library is that it neatly transcends these political struggles. It contains every type of literature, literally every book printed in the UK, and many more besides. It admits everyone, from those wanting to research the latest scientific breakthrough, to those who just want a quiet place to read The Glass Lake. It would be a shame for it to have to compromise its democratic and world-leading standards by forcing readers to pay.
