Readers' love letters to libraries

After leading authors showed their love for libraries in written and graphic form, it’s readers’ turn. From life-defining visits to treasured childhood memories, these are some of our favourite tributes

• Love letters to libraries: authors from AL Kennedy to Michael Morpurgo share their love for libraries and librarians


• See all the readers’ contributions and submit your own on GuardianWitness

Libraries won’t be going out of fashion any day soon, if readers’ love for them is anything to go by. They are nonetheless an endangered species, with demolitions and closures planned across the UK and beyond.

On the Guardian books blog we’ve taken Book Week Scotland as a prompt to celebrate everything that’s great about them. Michael Morpurgo made a passionate plea for free books for kids in all communities, especially deprived ones; Chris Riddell drew a beautiful account of the books that changed his life; Jacqueline Wilson talked about the Kingston library where she discovered Laura Ingalls Wilder and Virginia Woolf; the Etherington Brothers’ comic strip was an eccentric homage to Arundel library; AL Kennedy praised her own for helping her discover who she was; and Alexander McCall Smith wrote a letter to a 17th-century Scottish public library.

There’s a camaraderie about the library too. Barring the odd sulky schoolchild forced there for an assignment, everybody is there by choice and has a shared interest. Like cyclists nodding to one another as they pass on a snowy day, people are friendly – we know we have something in common just by dint of being there.

If chocolate is the food of love, I saw someone hand in an actual love letter to a library once. A homeless man ahead of me in the queue for the desk handed the librarians a family-size bar of chocolate. “Because I’m always happy to be here,” he said, hand physically on heart.

… the only library we had access to was the mobile library which came once a week. As a primary school child visiting it was the highlight of my week. My sister and I went with our mother and stocked up on our week’s reading matter. The sheer thrill of getting home and unpacking the bag of books and deciding what to read first is one of my best childhood memories. Now the mobile library no longer visits the village so we frequent charity shops to provide my 80+ year-old mother with the reading matter she devours.

I’ve just written back to my local library to thank them for the autumn they gave me a place of refuge when I’d broken my hand and couldn’t work. I wrote a book in there, which has just been published. The library gave me a place to work, people to be surrounded by, and most importantly, shelves full of books to read when I was struggling with my own.

Libraries aren’t trying to sell you anything for money. But they are trying to sell you the idea that learning is wonderful and reading is wonderful, sometimes even with no purpose or aim in mind except for getting lost in books. Some people might think that’s overrated and useless, but a lot of us would find our lives a lot poorer if we weren’t allowed to think like that.

Austen, the Brontës and Dickens in a Hong Kong village

As Ray Bradbury, I was also raised by the library. A one-room facility in an island village off Hong Kong, there I first read Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Kafka, Shakespeare … (in Chinese). I didn’t understand some of them but I read them anyway.

I live in Canada now and will pass on my love for the library to my family. A photo of Vancouver Public Library where we visit every week:

As a very young child I remember my mother clutching my hand as I walked wide-eyed through the fog towards this blazing liner of a building which much later I realised was the large local branch library. So the habit was deeply ingrained and when many years later I worked in a busy reference library it was second nature to me. It was pre-internet and was used as a valuable resource by the community.

However, I do remember one day dealing with a phone enquiry from a woman who wanted the answer to the last clue in her crossword. I was half amused by her casual admission that she couldn’t be bothered to come in and look it up herself. Presumably reference librarians would now say “Google it” to her and go back to examining Facebook. Libraries, like society, have evolved and many councils prefer an all-singing all-dancing “learning hub/creche/IT room/coffee bar” environment. A centralised location keeps costs down and from their perspective it’s easier to close down outlying inefficient branch libraries.

Grew up near this forward-thinking library during a golden age in Chicago when park districts, museums, and public libraries were still funded generously by city and state government. Honestly cannot imagine how my life might have turned out otherwise because, like Neil Gaiman, I too was a feral child who sought and found refuge in these safe spaces where I could explore and read freely. This set the tone for the rest of my life and libraries and their collections remain a great source of contentment and succour to this day.

‘The lower the shelves, the more chaotic the filing’

When I was young my idea of a great day out was to spend the day in our local library, Barnsley Central. It was recently built in a very modern (then) style, with vast open space and places to sit and read. It was an almost unbelievable treasure trove, full of books on any and every subject, which you could just pick up and browse through, picking up morsels of arcane and obscure knowledge.

I suppose it was inevitable that my first job, a Saturday job, was in that library. Spending every Saturday shelving books was perfect, making me Queen of the Library, knowing where to find books on any subject.

There is nothing like the smell of a library. That combination of wood, polish and bound paper. It is an aroma that transports me back to my small, local library in the middle of a large council estate in Redcar in the north east of England.

I was the only kid in there every Saturday morning from the age of about nine years old. This was in the days when you had to be silent in the library, on pain of receiving a stern, dark frown from the other readers. My shoes on the highly polished wood floor made such a loud click-click that I walked around on tiptoes for the whole hour that I was there.

My mother was a librarian at the local public library in our small town when I was a child. I would go there after school until one of my parents was done with work and could take me home. It was my second home, my daycare, my playground, and my dreamscape. I’ve never felt so cocooned in safety and imaginatively liberated at any other time in my life. It was here that I learned that learning didn’t have to be work or a chore, but could be fun and the best use of your time. I will take these lessons with me until my dying day. Thank you.

I love this little library which is just round the corner from where I live. The telephone box was bought by the Brockley Society and converted into a library. It is managed by volunteers and is incredibly well-used. Open 24 hours a day, completely free and no fines to pay. What’s not to like?

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