Some time back, I wrote of the culture shock of visiting where my once-beloved local library used to be. Used to, because recently the old library was demolished and replaced by a modernist monstrosity resembling a stray golf-ball mutilated by the groundskeeper’s ride-on mower. Its nickname is “the Death Star” and it is well earned.
Floor after gleaming floor of ‘multi-function learning spaces’, a pretentious coffee shop, of course, and far too many ‘modern’ couches. I imagine they have a devil of a time in winter chasing the city’s homeless away from what must be invitingly warm sleeping spaces. In summer, it seems, the homeless just seek the shade of the park outside, where they sit under trees and gibber at passersby.
The only thing that’s in somewhat shorter supply, in this ultra-modern library, is books. Oh, they had them, all right – almost grudgingly. And, at an eyeball estimate, far fewer, arranged with Marie Kondo severity on its five levels, than the old building used to cram into a single floor.
The destruction of the library of my childhood is no isolated event. It’s wholly of a piece with the Long March Left’s steady destruction of the great institutions of the West, less by violent revolution than by steady, soulless, bureaucratic destruction.
In the case of libraries, this has meant a commitment to the principle of getting rid of as many books as possible. The practice, labelled by librarians as ‘deaccessioning’ or, repulsively, ‘weeding the stock’, rests on some untested claims. One, that old books somehow physically disintegrate, was long ago annihilated by that great man Nicholson Baker in a rare polemic against librarians. Another is that users find the mere presence of old books off-putting. Libraries are more than just books, the librarians chant, tossing their solitary copy of Buddenbrooks into the skip.
The immediate result of these claims, in some quarters, is a professional principle that a portion of a library’s entire stock – possibly as much as five per cent – should be disposed of every year. In theory, a library’s current holdings could be thrown away in 20 years.
If he thinks it will take even that long, he’s being unduly optimistic.
Go into your local library and look at the fiction shelves. You won’t find Meredith or Nabokov or Proust or Thackeray or any of the good writers who have taught us how to think and feel. You might, at best, be able to order up a copy of a few of Dickens’s novels from a remote stock. You certainly aren’t going to come across them in an act of idle browsing. At best, you are going to find shelves of terrible paperback novels expected to be disposed of in a year or two, unlikely to appeal to anyone developing an interest in literature who wants to make their own way discovering books.
Librarians have made libraries useless by throwing away most of what made them useful.
Which, it seems, is all part of the plan.
And then the fourth stage of the process takes hold. An institution, having damaged itself, is of much less use to the people who might be expected to use it. They stop using it. Forty-five years ago, the 15-year-old me would have gone to Sheffield City Library to see whether I could find a really good novel on the shelves I’d never heard of. And the library on a Saturday morning was as crowded as a good butcher or baker. No one that age would waste their time looking in a library for that now.
In the case of my old, beloved home-town library, the chi-chi coffee shop on the ground floor is the closest the place draws to a crowd – if half a dozen people looking at their phones can be called a crowd. The floors above, supposedly dedicated to what a library is actually supposed to be for, were practically deserted.
Finally, we reach the fifth stage. Those who administer the institution notice that it is used much less than it was and no longer serves any general purpose. What, after all, is the point in going on funding these places? Times move on.
And the Long March marches on.
As if to ram the point home, the re-developers of my old library demolished and banished the old feature wall that used to stand in the park outside the library, a weathered slab of marble looking like a set from George Pal’s 1960 The Time Machine. For decades, that wall stood to sternly inspire the citizens of my town with its time-blackened, cast-iron epigram:
All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
What magical words, indeed. For as long as I could remember, they had entranced me with their wisdom and inspired me to learn.
Alas, the Edwardian gents who established the city’s cultural precinct (including law courts, a surprisingly impressive regional art gallery, a rotunda that once echoed to the footsteps of a Prince of Wales and a small park where a later Prince of Wales, the current King, once charmed hundreds of schoolchildren shuttled for an otherwise-dull outing) were of a far more serious mindset than today’s elite.
Who cares about stuffy old books, when you can have floor after gleaming floor of ‘experiences’? Experiences, it seems, mostly in the grim soullessness of the globalist world state.
