My Life in Libraries by Peter Leyland
My Life in Libraries
Moving from the junior to the senior library at the age of 13 was for me a rite of passage. I can remember the first book I borrowed from there, Nancy Wake by Russell Braddon, pictured. It didn’t have that vivid book jacket illustration, just a black and dusty cover with the title and author at the top of the spine. I had already read Russell Braddon’s The Naked Island, a memoir about the author's trials in a Japanese POW camp, so I was keen to read more. Nancy Wake, however, was somewhat different to my usual fare, causing my mother to raise a quizzical eyebrow when she asked to see what I had borrowed - a rite of passage indeed.
Garston Library in Liverpool, near my then home from where I borrowed the book, was a place I frequently visited at that early age. Pictured below is the reading room, largely unchanged from then to now. Another significant book I borrowed there was Three Lives for Mississippi by William Bradford Hughie. This dealt with the abduction and murder of three civil rights workers and was very much the beginning of my feelings of outrage at the issues of racial segregation which were at the time coming to a head in the United States. At fifteen racism was an idea which I was unable to fully comprehend but I sensed that it was morally wrong. I was, however, saved from the despair caused by the unprovoked and unpunished violence which had led to those murders by the songs of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, my favourite singers of that time.
Thinking further about the significance of libraries in my life, I have one very memorable event that I can recall. This was when the librarian at the Middle School where I worked during the 2000s said that I could choose any books I wanted from the school’s Millenium Collection. She was getting rid of them because they were not thought applicable for our Middle School age range, 9-13. (The school had been given them because we were deemed ‘secondary’.) It didn’t seem the place to argue the importance of literature at any age, or what is suitable for whoever, so I looked over the bookshelves and took a selection away with me: The Awakening by Kate Chopin, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, The Ripley Novels by Patricia Highsmith, The Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, and To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. They are beautiful editions containing superb introductions and detailed chronologies of events in the authors’ lives. Reflecting on this now, I wonder whether I should have made a case for the school to keep them. Who knows what a thirteen year old might have gained from The Awakening or Catch 22, for instance?
Ray Bradbury, author of books like Fahrenheit 451 has been quoted as saying, ‘Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future,’ and I read with mounting concern in a recent Observer article by Richard Ovenden, head of Oxford University libraries, that in the United States since Donald Trump took office many books have been banned from libraries, data deleted, and librarians sacked without explanation. Ovenden tells of campaigners such as ‘Moms for Liberty’, controlling and limiting what young people can read, and what ideas they can encounter. Targets for these bans include key texts of racial literature by authors like Alice Walker and Maya Angelou. Also, in one American state a landmark book on the Holocaust, the graphic novel entitled Maus by Art Spiegelman, has been banned.
There are many other examples of the suppression of books in the USA, and this is an article worth reading if you want to know more. Richard Ovenden goes on to reference events in Berlin in 1933 where books considered to be non-German, those from a library of human sexuality on LGBTQ+ themes for example, were burned on a pyre on the Unter den Linden boulevard. I was reminded that Fahrenheit 451, the title of Ray Bradbury’s abovementioned book, is the temperature that is required to burn paper.
Bradbury’s book was written during the McCarthy era in America when the fear of communism led to all sorts of repressive legislation. Figures like playwright Arthur Miller were blacklisted because of their supposed communist sympathies. Miller hit back at this in his play The Crucible (1953) which attacked through the mirror of the Salem Witches trial the dangers of mass hysteria, unfounded accusations and the suppression of dissent.
Today amongst the horror and destruction of wars in The Middle East, libraries have been shown to have an important place in the survival of ideas through reading. In 2021 on the AuthorsElectric site, I published an article on “The Companionship of Books” and I referenced an excellent book by Delphine Minoui entitled The Book Collectors of Daraya about an 'underground' library in Syria. Thumbing through this now I come across a reference by the author to Fahrenheit 451. Minoui is discussing Ahmad, one of her subjects’ reaction to Bashar al-Assad’s barrel bomb attacks on civilians in the suburb of Daraya:
"If he could burn us alive, he would!" (Ahmad says.)
“This time I’m the one who retreats into silence. I can’t help but think of Fahrenheit 451. About the mad firemen who set books alight in Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel. About the special brigade that roams the streets to punish offenders.
I remember a sentence uttered by the head fireman, Captain Beatty:
A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?
And I tell myself that one day I’ll share this work of fiction with Ahmad. A prophetic novel he can add to his long reading list.” pp 65-66
I don’t know whether Ahmad survived the barrel bomb attacks. I know that things have changed in Syria and that Bashar al-Assad is now a fugitive in Moscow being sheltered by Vladimir Putin from the consequences of his murderous acts. For me Delphine Minoui’s book is a lodestar on the importance which libraries have in the preservation of truth and justice.
My initial thoughts about libraries were centred upon the suburban library in Garston, Liverpool, near where I was born, and they led me into a range of personal reflections, my final thoughts are more mundane and centre upon the town where I now live. Last month I was taken with five others upon a library induction tour, courtesy of Library Flex, a new system in Buckinghamshire for accessing one’s local library when no staff member is present. Using my library card, I can now enter the library and do things like:
Relax, read and study in the library
Use the free Wi-Fi with your device
Use the public computers for up to one hour free per day
Use the self-service kiosks to issue and return items.
Collect reservations ready for pickup.
The new system begins in August. Yesterday, I collected Arnold Bennnet’s The Old Wives’ Tale from the librarian at the front desk which I had asked to be reserved for me. How far away that other desk in Garston library seems now when I was picking up Nancy Wake so many years ago and having it date stamped, and yet how near.
References
The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) by Arnold Bennett
Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury
The Naked Island (1952) by Russell Braddon
Nancy Wake (1956) by Russell Braddon
Three Lives for Mississippi (1965) by William Bradford Hughie
The Book Collectors of Daraya (2020) by Delphine Minoui
‘There is no political power without power over the archive’ by Richard Ovenden in The Observer, 13th July 2025
Photograph of Garston Library from the website
*In September/October this year I am hoping to have a short article about The Companionship of Books published by Fusion
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