The Good Library Blog

I was amused to come across Cooke's account of her visit to the Whitechapel Idea Store (formerly my local, erm, Idea Store). While preparing to move things out of storage to Berlin I went through boxes of books in storage, took a suitcase in to the Idea Store to see if they'd like any - I had a boxed set of Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy, which I didn't expect to read again, some other books which I'd thought good but didn't expect to reread. The person on duty was very unhappy, because "they" didn't like it at all when people donated books; she agreed to take them, in the end, as a favour to me, and see if the Bethnal Green branch might have a use for them. (I note that Cooke comments on the sparse collection; experience suggests that numbers are kept down only by tireless battle with an unhelpful public.)

Do not let anybody say that it is simply readers continually grumbling about Brighton Library.

The authors of the recent Pevsner Guide to Brighton and Hove - one of them part of English Heritage - note that the building's staircase and corridors are out of keeping with the rest while "the shelving in particular falls well below the quality of design established for the building and, such is the scale of the main spaces, there seem remarkably few books".

There can be no sidestepping this matter. Everybody is talking about it. Two streets and one has a 90-name petition! World enough and time, the city would sign. More books would not only befit a place populated by keen readers but also help the acoustics which currently echo with voices throughout (the first floor is not separated from the ground floor but forms a sort of mezzanine). The design is also hampered by there being natural light only from the south.

And from the Cilip blog comes this response:-
http://communities.cilip.org.uk/blogs/update/archive/2009/03/23/media-morals.aspx

Very Politic in it never answes the questions Cooke speaks of.