Libraries as Storehouses of History

 
Two or three weeks ago I reminisced about libraries I have loved! Recent visits to various places sparked a further chain of memories. I still remember an April evening
sitting in the Carluke library (near 40 years ago!) reading an outline of
European History to get a handle on the Benevolent Despots. The sunset
streaming through the glass sided windows, the place virtually to myself, as an
18 year old about to sit Higher History having studied at night class, there
seemed nothing more important than sorting out the policies of Maria Theresa,
Catherine the Great of Russia, and the other guy from Prussia. (The photo is from the current Carluke Library website!)

By the time I got the Highers, and
was offered a place in the Glasgow MA course, books had simply become an
essential fact of my life, and one of its indispensable nutrients. But of
course there are books, and then there are books. The first book I bought at
University was for the Moral Philosophy class – it was Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes, a masterpiece of political realism
that anticipated the excesses of contemporary democratic decay such as cynicism
and truth-bending, power mongering and self-serving, and suggesting legal and
contractual restraints to channel and constrain political power. Actually, not
all that far from the allegorical connections to be discerned in Watership Down, the odd Western, and the
rise and decline of the Benevolent Despots!

During my time at Glasgow in the 1970’s, theology and philosophy were
on Floor 6 of the University Library. I still remember that first encounter
with hundreds of metres of books, set out in shelves, under subjects, every
volume findable if you could use the new technology of microfiche and translate
Dewey System into the kind of mapping code that took you to the very volume. Here
were more books than all the other libraries I’d known, all put together. I spent a whole evening handling,
browsing and reading bits of the multi-volume Encyclopaedia of Philosophy; reference books have always drawn me
like iron filings to a magnet. The idea of an encyclopaedia, a repository of
authoritative knowledge, isn’t very popular now, in the post-modern climate of
suspicion about overarching frameworks of knowledge. Did anyone else love and
wade through the Children’s Encyclopaedia of Arthur Mee?

In those first few weeks at
University I took down off the shelves books whose titles I had no way of
interpreting since I hadn’t yet encountered the currency of philosophical
discourse – metaphysics, epistemology, the categorical imperative, empiricism,
theodicy, utilitarianism, – or names like Immanuel Kant, Benedict Spinoza, Duns
Scotus, G W F Hegel. I was both ecstatic and terrified – so many books, most of
them crammed with words I hadn’t ever had need of before. Like everybody else
today, I surf the internet – but the battery hen approach to knowledge much of
the internet represents has never replaced for me its organic free range
alternative – the serendipity and random purposefulness of browsing in a
library with more books than you can ever read, but with enough time to touch,
handle and peruse, and perchance read.

Since then I’ve gradually built my
own library, housing on its shelves books that are now important clues to my
story and character. As a self-confessed, unembarrassed bibliophile, I’ve no
difficulty admitting my entire grown up life (and much of my childhood) has
presupposed a book budget – by which I mean money to purchase, time to read,
space to shelve and freedom to choose. From those childhood days when my
sainted Aunt Edith sent a ten bob note (10/- or 50p in today’s money) for
birthday with clear instructions to do what I liked with it – which meant books
– to now, books have simply been an existential presupposition, an assumed
necessity for human flourishing, that without which I could live, but not
without near fatal diminishment of soul.

Amongst those I have to thank for
endless and now uncountable hours of joy, work, learning, questioning and at
times finding, are those librarians of school, university and public libraries, whose
choices and suggestions opened up entire worlds of knowing and wanting to know.