Refuge
Libraries. Cherish the libraries, save the libraries, stock the libraries, fund the libraries.
What libraries look like when you don't have a government systematically starving communities of the arts: this is the section of Stockholm's main library aimed at 10-13 year olds. I nearly cried. pic.twitter.com/PjdFPOmVbA
— Sarah Perry (@SarahGPerry) March 22, 2018
I thought I was doing my part to support the libraries by marrying a librarian. ;-) It angers me how libraries are being starved.
iknklast,
You’re behind the times, nobody needs those book thingies, a one-page Wiki article is enough to master a subject these days.
A whole page? In these sound-byte days a chapter heading is sufficient for expertise.
I love libraries, always have done. Decades ago, I was regularly sent out of R.E. class for being disruptive (asking questions rather than swallowing the myths, basically) and made to spend the lesson time in the library as punishment!
Oh, the inhumanity of it all!
The library was my safe place when the kids began bullying me in school. There is nowhere I like much better than being surrounded by books.
The great benighted purge of our libraries. A good article by Prof. Michael Wilding:
“Fisher Library at the University of Sydney is the foremost English-language library in the southern hemisphere and South-East Asia. The very rationale of such an institution is that, as a copyright library with a lengthy history, its holdings are large, far larger than most university libraries in the UK or USA. It is in the nature of such a library that it holds books that have not been borrowed for five years, or ten years, or thirty years. That is why scholars have traditionally used it, because books are there, and on the shelves. The stacks are open to borrowers, unlike the state libraries. You can go amongst them and browse and discover things not listed in bibliographies or discovered by search engines.
“All those scholars who have actually done any original work themselves will tell you of the extraordinary significance of serendipity, of just coming across a book on the shelves of whose existence they were unaware, of catching sight of a title that was unknown but that might have some relevance to the search in hand. Significant discoveries of esoteric facts, arcane parallels, unexpected contexts have recurrently been made in this way. And the discoveries are usually of forgotten books, books from obscure presses or remote places, that have not been noted in the scholarly mainstream, books that have probably not been looked at for fifty years. But this is what is meant by library resources. Not the obvious or modish or famous or infamous, but the unknown or forgotten.”
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2011/7-8/the-great-purge-of-our-libraries/
As a voracious reader I look at those pictures and wonder why so much space is taken up by things other than books.
Hopefully that’s just the reading corner and the other 95%-98% of the books are behind the photographer (I do see some shelves reflected in the windows).
I had that thought too, especially about the looming screen-like objects, but on the other hand I like the welcoming atmosphere and choose to think, as you say, that the books are just outside the frame.