When I was a child, within the cosy confines of my local library – a place that always smelled pleasingly of polish and paper – I made friends. I made friends with Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula, with Robert Louis Stevenson and M.R. James, with Edith Wharton and Stephen King.
I travelled too – to dusty Montana dinosaur fields, to pirate islands, to the moon and back. And my travels weren’t only fictional. As a fossil-obsessed boy, I used the resources of the library to reach out to the Natural History Museum and began a long correspondence with the Department of Palaeontology, even sending specimens back and forth hoping for identification.
I simply wouldn’t be the person I am, nor the writer I have become, without having this vital edifice so close to home. It’s easy to say that in the internet age, the library is redundant. Nothing could be further from the truth. They have a rosy future as community spaces, adapting to the fast pace of technology but not being sacrificed to it.
A library is more than a building. It’s a statement of intent. A shared space. A sanctuary. We remove these pieces of civilisation at our peril. Brick by brick
~ Mark Gatiss.