Libraries in books

9662903lt lt3

I love the library, and I love thinking and reading about the library, too. This week I’ve been enjoying Tessa Hadley’s novel, The London Train, and this morning I encountered this perfect depiction of the exchange between librarian and patron in a public library:

At first she had thought it might be her duty to encourage the borrowers, talking to them about the books they were choosing, but she quickly learned that they looked at her with shocked faces if she tried, as if their reading was a private place she’d intruded into. The whole point of her role was to be neutral, she realised, not engaged or committed. The hand-to-hand exchange at the issue desk—taking the books, opening them, date-stamping them, handing them back—was a soothing ritual of community. Even when she was helping the asylum seekers who came in to research information on the Internet in support of their appeals, she never discussed the content of what they were looking for; they only strove together through the process of finding it. This exemption from the effort of relationship seemed to her to be a relief to them both.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s
https://indicativemood.com/2015/05/17/libraries-in-books/
indicativemood.com
CC-MAIN-2023-23
89827
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:LESYZ2NJ3XPIIVB6KAXXX4XI6DW2QJGS
<urn:uuid:1437d2a3-bafe-45e6-8afd-bd659ae4bbef>
2023-06-03T18:06:24Z
192.0.78.24
text/html
sha1:FHWRC7EAZOPRIXXVAJBU3YLJIKZIOGIC
<urn:uuid:7f763b11-1658-491c-a2fa-ecc57a516c93>
https://indicativemood.com/2015/05/17/libraries-in-books/
response
<urn:uuid:646c3527-ce55-4465-92b2-d29452a56a9a>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2023-23
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for May/June 2023
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-118
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/