Our Libraries, Our Cure
In her 2018 performance Nanette, comedian Hannah Gadsby is clear about the transformative, connective, and healing power of storytelling; stories, she tells us, hold our cure.1 And if that’s the case, then it’s not hard to imagine librarians as doctors, pharmacists, and Indigenous healers, prescribing stories and knowledge instead of medicines. Or our libraries as hospitals, pharmacies, sweat lodges, and red tents, as special places people visit to find ways to feel better, or to just feel better about themselves. Some may find this idea far-fetched, but the concept of prescribing stories and library visits to aid well-being is not as fanciful as it may appear.
Standing in the heart of one of England’s famed Cathedral cities, Gloucester Public Library is a lively neo-Gothic building with an embattled history. I hadn’t worked there long when I encountered my first Glostonian with a book prescription. Both she and I were unprepared; she had not expected this therapeutic turn of events; I had not been trained for it. Taking the neon-coloured slip from her quivering, freshly hennaed hand, I found a veteran colleague who promptly enrolled her as a library member and then — with a range of social anxiety books and memoirs — filled her prescription.2 Schooled in the newly launched “Books on Prescription” service, the patient-visitor, Farah, and I both left the issue desk with a greater understanding of the curative potential of stories, reading, and libraries.
As it was Farah’s first visit to the library, I took her on a little tour of the grand building, lingering at the self-help section and the graphic novels section — discovering that we shared a passion for comics, especially old American superhero stories — and passing the coffee hub — another shared passion — I remember laughing when she said that she wished all pharmacies smelled like coffee and had sofas, comics, and Wi-Fi. The experience stuck with me and with Farah, who became a regular library patron and a firm friend. It was a serendipitous encounter, a happy accident; a phenomenon for which libraries are renowned: cross the threshold of a library and you never know what you’ll discover, a new author, a new friend, a new way of organising ourselves, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Farah’s fresh-eyed observation stuck with me. I had never thought of the library like that before, as another kind of place. But she was right. During her visit, the library had indeed functioned like a pharmacy, albeit one dispensing knowledge. Pharmacy: a particular building where people pass special pieces of paper over counters to qualified people who, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, follow “the instructions written by a medical practitioner authorising a patient to be issued with a medicine or treatment”, in this case issuing a few well-worn books. And like a lot of folks leaving pharmacies, Farah left the library with a lighter step and a heavier bag. Making my way back to the crowded issue desk — still staffed by the unflappable liber-pharmacist, Maria — I looked around and saw Gloucester Public Library with fresh eyes too. The famed house of stories, I thought, might just indeed “hold our cure”. Not just helping restore us to rude health, but our communities, our societies, our world.
Opened in 1900, the first members of Gloucester Public Library would be astonished at the range of services offered by public libraries today. Long gone are the days when the local library housed and loaned only books and periodicals, and perhaps some sheet music. Libraries, not just in the UK but around the world, are testing the limits of the word “library”.
With my new perspective, I imagined the sign above the door changing as people approached the building. Flitting over like one of those wonderful old split-flap airport departure boards, it noisily announced what the place would become for them — secondhand bookstore, pharmacy, computer lab, study space — before reverting to the word “library” once they crossed the threshold. In any given day, the board would sensorially burble through many words. Imagine it with me:
library ⇌ coffeehouse ⇌ workspace ⇌ print shop ⇌ job centre ⇌ estate agency ⇌ safe space ⇌ warm space ⇌ foodbank ⇌ advice centre ⇌ council services ⇌ mental health services ⇌ learning hub ⇌ craft club ⇌ photography club ⇌ book group ⇌ writing group ⇌ games place ⇌ yoga den ⇌ bike repair shop ⇌ thrift shop ⇌ after-school club ⇌ language club ⇌ visitor attraction ⇌ wedding venue ⇌ gallery ⇌ cinema ⇌ garden ⇌ home, but cruelly a home you can’t sleep in — many libraries have policies prohibiting snoozing with staff instructed to wake and eject catnappers, a stealthy policy designed to target unhoused people; I never saw anyone enforce this grim policy.
This is an insufficient list. If I included every reason to visit a library today, it’d be out of date by tomorrow. The modern library — idea and place — juxtaposes in a single space several places, sites that are themselves often incompatible. I imagine it as an apeirogon, an ambivalent place of countably infinite purposes, reflecting the best and worst of our civic imagination, fast becoming linchpins in today’s culture wars. Institutions, corporations, sociocultural practices, and crises are eroding traditional ideas of libraries; the lines between leisure, home, and work, as well as productive and unproductive space, are blurring within their walls, and beyond them; neoliberalism and propaganda are driving this societal shift, and digital technology and the COVID-19 pandemic are accelerating it.
In the 2018 film I Think We're Alone Now, Peter Dinklage plays a library worker living in his workplace, and despite the film’s apocalyptic setting, it’s an idea with appeal.3 A lot of folks, including myself, daydream about living in a library; our world, a peaceful, coffee-scented place with lots of books, a few motes of dust, and fewty people.4 The reality of living in a working library would fall well short of that dream, however.5 It’d likely be more akin to the exploitative, paternalistic, and capitalist version of a blended work-life balance that we’ve seen before: “company towns”, anyone? And are facing again: “Googletown”, anyone? “Librarytown” might seem a bit of a leap, but not so long ago the Association of Research Libraries mooted — though quickly retracted — the idea of converting “some office-space into low-cost housing for our staff”.6 The idea of it still stiffens my spine, triggering memories of my mother’s Aesopian admonition, “Be careful what you wish for”.
The world is changing fast, and libraries with it, but public discourse isn’t keeping pace, nor imaginaries. Now is the time to slow things down, to pause, to catch our breath, and to think deeply about what libraries are, what they mean to us, and what we wish them to be. Now is the time to disturb the flow of progress — ever onward, ho! —and the utopian discourse circulating the modern library, with its proclivity for utility. Why? Because idealised discourse prevents us from forging the thoughts, words, solidarities, and actions that could derail the dystopian future awaiting the library, and us. Libraries, like a cultural semaphore, allow us to reflect on who we are, who we wish to be, and the kind of world we want to live in. Now is the time to start that frank conversation, to start remembering that the library — via its materials and services — not only holds our cure, but in supplying a rare, practical, and positive example of how to organise ourselves and our institutions differently, it is our cure.
To be continued….
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Hannah Gadsby: Nanette, directed by Madeleine Parry and Jon Olb (Netflix, 2018).
Realising the value and popularity of health and library service collaborations, Scotland and Wales later followed England’s lead, with Northern Ireland running a similar but more informal “Read Yourself Well” service. NI Libraries also offer lightboxes—used to alleviate Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)—for use within branch libraries.
I Think We’re Alone Now, directed by Reed Morano (Momentum Pictures, 2018).
“Fewty” in both senses, as awesome and scarce.
There are other, more progressive ways of blending work and home, of which libraries can also play a key part, but that’s another story.
See, https://web.archive.org/web/20221019125440/https://twitter.com/ARLnews/status/1582693375718748161.