Philip Hensher: These temples of learning transformed Britain 31 December 2007 c/o Independent

Philip Hensher: These temples of learning transformed Britain
Published: 31 December 2007
As a boy, I used to hang around libraries, picking over books for hours and in the end taking out the maximum number permitted. In Sheffield City Library in the late 1970s that meant seven. I have no doubt that people like me were an enormous irritation to the librarians; they have never much cared for that other habit I had at the time, coming back shortly for another seven.

Most English writers, I guess, have the same history, of exhausting the resources of their nearest branch library before discovering the expansive reaches of a great municipal library. Though I went beyond Sheffield City Library when I went to university, that was the important one for me, a grand art deco palace of knowledge. I borrowed all Nabokov's novels from there, and all of Cocteau; I borrowed the piano score of Berg's Lulu and, I am sorry to say, wrote fingering all over it; I got tired of waiting for the first volumes of Proust ever to be on the shelves, and took out Albertine Disparue.

If that sounds absurdly posturing, the point is that all of this was openly available, and the great public library used to demonstrate that there was no distinction in accessibility between Ulysses and Mazo de la Roche, between that noble and honourable lady Catherine Cookson and Nabokov. You could get any of it.

Jonathan Rose's magnificent and spellbinding book, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, shows how the movement for subscribing and public libraries formed the intellectual life of the nation. There were Welsh miners who had views on Nietzsche, women who lived in the slums of the East End who read Balzac. An observer in the late 1950s discovered that more than 90 per cent of the working-class men surveyed could give some account of H G Wells, G B Shaw and Dickens.

Frankly, I would be delighted now if any of the undergraduates whom I teach had ever heard of Shaw. Judging from the difficulty some of them have in reading a novel from beginning to end, I would guess that they have never had access to a good municipal library. In the past 30 years, libraries have been handed over to professional managers of stock, who see no virtue in preserving anything but what happens to be popular at the time. The same is happening, scandalously, even to university libraries.

Public libraries were so great, and transformed the intellectual life of this country, because they recognised a truth which every reader knows for himself; you don't know what you want until it leaps off the shelf into your hands. A good library has enough odd corners and strange collections to allow a reader to find his own way. It can create writers, too.