I am off to Oxford to give a lecture I have called “Risky Encounters”, about the excitement and dangers of the library in film and fiction (from David Lodge’s British Museum is Falling Down to Agatha Christies’s Body in the Library and The Music Man).
There have been a whole range of quasi-metaphysical speculations about the library in Modern Thought (go to Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco, for example). These tend to see it as a metaphor, for the universe itself, for human memory or for empire. I’m being much more down to earth, reflecting on how our day-to-day experience of libraries relates to all the crime, sex and murders that are regularly set in them. Why is the library such a favourite place for writers to imagine all those lurid deeds, and what difference do those fictional libraries make to our understanding of what goes on in their real life equivalents?
But in the course of writing the lecture, I have been thinking about how the libraries I know have changed in the last fifty years. There are some obvious things. Most obvious perhaps has been the move from card catalogues, or even guard books, to their online equivalent. (I have come to accept the inevitability of this change, but I wish librarians had occasionally conceded that there were some advantages in those old card catalogues – in most cases they were actually quicker at searching.) And you will now find more people in a reading room looking at their screens than looking at a printed page. (Do you remember when we were all so anxious about other readers nicking our laptops that we chained them to our desks?)
I have become more struck, however, by something a bit grubbier. I suspect that most people under fifty-five or so will have no idea that you used to be able to smoke in libraries. Not in all libraries, of course. For centuries the Bodleian has made its readers promise not to bring fire and fire-making equipment (matches) into the library. And over my time in Cambridge, the University Library only ever allowed smoking in a designated area in the tearoom, or in the internal courtyard (no longer). But while I was a student in Cambridge, it was possible to smoke on the tables at the back of the Classical Faculty Library (no one said what exactly you were allowed to smoke). And when I moved to a job in London in 1979, there were several libraries (including that of the Institute of Classical Studies) where you could still light up.
That gradually changed over the early 1980s. One by one, driven no doubt by rising insurance premiums as well as health concerns, libraries started banning it. Eventually it was only the Warburg Institute where you could still read and smoke (part of their core reader base were elderly Eastern European gentlemen who were not going to be separated from their pipes and fags). But the result was that every academic smoker in the capital seemed to take refuge in the Warburg, whose atmosphere became almost unbreathable even for a keen smoker like me (as I was then). So inevitably they banned it too, much to the chagrin of the old gentlemen.
Now it’s such a distant memory that you could hardly believe that once upon a time library users were reading their books, while striking their matches and taking some very unhealthy drags.
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