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August 15, 2007
James Purnell and the magic broomstick
The new minister for culture James Purnell (the old one was Tessa Jowell!) has been boasting that some people borrowed copies of the new Harry Potter book from public libraries. I suppose someone in the DCMS thinks that is newsworthy enough to be the ministers first pronouncement on public libraries
What no one will have told him is that there are quite a lot of library authorities who still take their childrens books 'on approval' before they buy them. And therefore there were probably some who took a copy of the Harry Potter book for the investigation of their librarians on the day of publication, before committing any council money to purchasing one in the following few weeks
and just as Mr Purnell ommitted in his press release to say just which libraries opened at midnight for publication- so I shall omit to say which didn't have any copies at all in order to avoid their embarassment
Posted by Tim Coates at August 15, 2007 7:24 PM