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Daniel Macklin illustration, Ursula Buchan, SF 69

Shelving My Assumptions

Last year, in response to a public consultation on the viability of my local public library, I offered to volunteer my unskilled services every Friday afternoon. This was my small way of signalling to the county council how precious a resource I believed the library to be, even if I hadn’t visited it that often since my children left school. (I would need three lifetimes to read the books already residing on my own shelves.) The library is situated in a reasonably, but not excessively, prosperous small town, with a mixed-age population; like a thousand others across the country, I guess. I was gratefully welcomed by the professional librarians and set to work putting returned books back in their proper place on the shelves.

In my working life, I have met professional archivists, since I sometimes carry out research in correspondence and newspaper collections. They are courteous but firm, and sticklers for the rules, since they are in charge of irreplaceable, and often very valuable, historical documents. Librarians in public libraries are altogether more relaxed. If my experience is anything to go by, they are endlessly patient with stupid questions, surprisingly tolerant of noise, and extremely good with children. My shelving activities free them to do what they do best, which is to think up imaginative craft-based schemes to catch the interest of readers, especially youthful ones.

The most challenging stacking task, I soon discovered, concerns children’s books. The minute differences between the various publishers’ reading schemes make me frantic, and the lurid covers of young fiction give me a headache. (It must be worse for children, who have so much sharper eyesight than me.) I easily tire of shelving books featuring charmless dinosaurs or winsome aliens. I was also initially surprised to discover that many children’s books are written by people who have mad

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Last year, in response to a public consultation on the viability of my local public library, I offered to volunteer my unskilled services every Friday afternoon. This was my small way of signalling to the county council how precious a resource I believed the library to be, even if I hadn’t visited it that often since my children left school. (I would need three lifetimes to read the books already residing on my own shelves.) The library is situated in a reasonably, but not excessively, prosperous small town, with a mixed-age population; like a thousand others across the country, I guess. I was gratefully welcomed by the professional librarians and set to work putting returned books back in their proper place on the shelves.

In my working life, I have met professional archivists, since I sometimes carry out research in correspondence and newspaper collections. They are courteous but firm, and sticklers for the rules, since they are in charge of irreplaceable, and often very valuable, historical documents. Librarians in public libraries are altogether more relaxed. If my experience is anything to go by, they are endlessly patient with stupid questions, surprisingly tolerant of noise, and extremely good with children. My shelving activities free them to do what they do best, which is to think up imaginative craft-based schemes to catch the interest of readers, especially youthful ones. The most challenging stacking task, I soon discovered, concerns children’s books. The minute differences between the various publishers’ reading schemes make me frantic, and the lurid covers of young fiction give me a headache. (It must be worse for children, who have so much sharper eyesight than me.) I easily tire of shelving books featuring charmless dinosaurs or winsome aliens. I was also initially surprised to discover that many children’s books are written by people who have made their reputations in strikingly different spheres. I had been under the impression that children’s fiction was a specialized skill, but obviously not if any old Nobel-winning physicist, Premier League footballer or prima ballerina can get published.
In my role as amateur bookshelver, I have discovered that I am both a Dewey fetishist and an alphabet obsessive, aspiring conscientiously to reassign the books that careless readers put back in the wrong place. It has made me weirdly intolerant of variant spellings of names. Why can’t all ‘Mc’s’ be ‘Mac’s’ or vice versa? And don’t get me started on the names of Scandi noir writers. My experiences in this library have also taught me how little I knew about the reading habits of the nation. I now realize that for half a lifetime I have been wasting precious energy writing high- minded, exhaustively researched, carefully edited, annotated and illustrated non-fiction, which frankly leaves my fellow citizens almost completely cold. The starkest jolt I received occurred as soon as I was shown round the library on my first day. I discovered that the section devoted to crime fiction vastly outstripped in size those of history, biography, literary fiction, crafts, gardening, cooking, travel and even romantic fiction. And I now understand why. It is not uncommon on a Friday afternoon to see a dozen elderly ladies decant from their shopping bags a pile of paperbacks with strident, garish covers featuring bloody knives, hangmen’s nooses or spooky alleyways; these, I’m guessing (since I have not the nerve to read them myself), enfold tales of murder, mayhem, corruption, cruelty and every variety of bodily fluid. These old ladies may be frail of frame but they are strong of stomach. Only a little research online convinced me that a number of authors of whom I had never until that moment heard – James Patterson, Jo Nesbo, David Baldacci, Peter James, for example – had made tidy sums and glowing reputations by writing lengthy series of gory thrillers.
That was by no means the only surprise, however. I also had no idea until I seriously studied the shelves that there were in the world so many ‘romances’ which feature (and I only slightly exaggerate) a doughty, sparky, sassy divorcée, running away from her past by opening a teashop in an attractive village. Her success and chance of future happiness are in the balance, for there is a strong risk that she will be thwarted by the machinations of a glowering landlord, with a chiselled profile and a tragic past. These volumes have bright, appealing primary colour covers and simple blurbs, on which the word ‘bestseller’ appears prominently. Should these books be written by Americans, the words ‘New York Times bestseller’ seem well-nigh obligatory. Although, as an untrained volunteer, I can never aspire to access to the library’s computer, I have sufficiently insinuated myself with the kindly librarians for them to be willing to let me loose with the ‘dead stock list’ – especially if they are preoccupied with creating the next Star Wars or Harry Potter children’s event for the following morning. The ‘dead stock list’ consists of titles that have not been borrowed by any reader for at least a year, and thus can be happily consigned to the ‘for sale’ pile, since the library is always chronically short of shelf space, especially to accommodate the aforementioned gory thrillers. However, it is very rare for a crime novel to find its way on to this list; it is in the far reaches of biography, history and foreign languages that the axe is inclined to fall. Most vulnerable of all are the books in the small ‘Classics’ section. The first time I was given the list, I was alarmed to see The Pilgrim’s Progress on it. With a look of wild surmise, I took the greatest Christian allegory ever written in English to the librarian’s desk, only to be reassured that she wouldn’t dream of letting John Bunyan go. All I needed to do, she advised, was to swipe my library card at the machine, take the book out and then immediately return it, so that it appeared on the computer as having been borrowed. Thus did Adam Bede, A Room with a View and Eugénie Grandet survive the cull. I make a habit nowadays of taking a few ‘Classics’ out each Friday, just as an insurance policy. I have even been known to take them home to read.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 69 © Ursula Buchan 2021


About the contributor

Despite the obvious rewards, Ursula Buchan has decided not to take up crime writing, but to remain working in the less dangerous sphere of non-fiction. Her biography of John Buchan, Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps, was published in 2019.

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