Feel Good Friday

Some miscellaneous things that celebrate the enjoyment of books :

A boy tries to steal a library book: a librarian notices and what happens transforms that boy's life forever.

On The New Yorker site a picture of what is probably the cutest children's playground library anywhere.  This magic mushroom can be found in Kyoto, Japan.

Neil Gaiman pays homage in The Times to Ray Bradbury whom he calls:

the builder of dreams

and how the author's works helped to form him as a writer. There have been several pieces in the newspapers about Bradbury lately, but this one is particularly heartfelt. 

And, ladies, if you need  little bookish eye-candy what is sexier than a hot guy reading? (I wasn't going to put this up, thinking my blog a bit too tabloid some days already, but since two readers sent me the link, what the heck!).

Have a great weekend.

Library Books by Post

Is it too much hassle to go to your local public library? Then let your library books come to you. This from the New Sunday Times today :

Come July, book lovers can soon obtain their favourite titles without leaving the comfort of their home.

That's when the U-Library portal, involving seven public libraries, is introduced to facilitate online book borrowing.

The libraries are Selangor Public Library, Negeri Sembilan Public Library, Kuala Lumpur Library, Intan Bukit Kiara Library, Pahang Public Library and the Sarawak State Library.

National Library director-general Datuk Raslin Abu Bakar said the pioneer project was currently in the process of digitalising reading material.

He said the portal would list titles that could be borrowed online, besides those of other books available at the respective libraries.

"Users nationwide can obtain reading material without having to go to the library, and the books will be sent by post to their doorstep," he said at a news conference after launching "Program ABC: Mari Membaca 1Malaysia" here yesterday.

This is all remarkably forward looking - let's just see how it works in practice.

An Overdue Post about Overdue Books

Some years ago, when I was living back in Harrow, Middlesex, I forgot about to take back a library book I had borrowed. How much could the library fine be? I was aghast to find that I was being faced with a penalty which was more than twice the cost of a brand new copy of the book! I argued with the librarian that this was plainly a ridiculous state of affairs, and that I was unemployed at the time. It all fell on deaf ears. I paid up but I never borrowed another book from the library. Seldom borrow a book from any library, in fact. And I think I am not alone in being put off in this way.

In fact the value (or not) of fines has become a hotly debated issue among librarians. (See here too.)

And you might remember the case in America where a woman went through the indignity of being arrested and handcuffed for failing to return an overdue book.

Now the New York Times reports on how some US libraries have found creative - and I think very sensible - ways to get around the problem of outstanding library fines including via food donations, donated fees (both for charity) and amnesty days.

Mind you, some of the best people have managed to run up library fines in their time ...

The World's Smallest Library

When a small English village lost its mobile library and public phone in the same week, the solution seemed obvious!

A Library Without Books

When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books ...

says Cushing Academy headmaster James Tracy. The administration of the 144 year old school, west of Boston, has decided to go entirely bookless, believing that the future of reading is digital.

LibraryThing's Tim Spalding said a few hours ago on Twitter :

I'm a tech entrepreneur. I'm more pro-tech than anyone I know. But I see ebooks as a disaster for everything I care about. Crazy?

Nope, I don't think so. And a library without physical books really scares me, to be honest.

The Library Books That Time Forgot

Sometimes libraries need a bit of friendly persuasion to let go of some of the outdated books on their shelves, the ones nobody borrows any more - if indeed they did in the first place.

The Guardian links a blog set up by two public spirited librarians from Detroit which provides plentiful examples of the worst books on library shelves, to encourage librarians to cull their shelves. Awful Library Books has become an unexpected hit, turning some very quirky titles, any of which reflect the way that attitudes, as a well as technology has changed.

And I'm sure Malaysian libraries can provide some equally odd titles! Let us know if you find any.

Revisiting Bradbury

I was so busy rushing headlong into the future, loving libraries and books and authors with all my heart and soul. was so consumed with becoming myself that I simply didn't notice that I was short, homely, and untalented ...

writes Ray Bradbury in the forward to Bradbury Stories: 100 of his Most Celebrated Tales.

I bought the book last night in Kinokunia, hungry to reread the stories that gave me so much pleasure when I was 15 or so, and which weened me off pulp sci-fi comics (the sort of stuff you guys would now call graphic fiction) and probably gave me more reading pleasure than anything else I picked up at that age.

I found them quite by accident : I lived in a small village in the very centre of England, with just one general store with one rotating stand of books for sale, most of which were lurid romances or thrillers.

I was drawn to Bradbury's books by the cover art (and try as I might I can't find pictures of those covers online now). What a happy coincidence it is when the right book and right reader collide!

Almost four decades later (!) I can still remember many of these tales, first encountered in The Illustrated Man and The Golden Apples of the Sun, and despite a jaded palate for reading at the moment (or maybe it's just time to write more?) am so looking forward to re-encountering them and discovering new ones that I didn't find the first time round.

Bradbury is still writing at 90 and recently launched a new collection of stories We'll Always Have Paris. Rob Woodard on The Guardian blog describes Bradbury's latest as being :

... as inventive and life-affirming as ever ...

Now Bradbury, his passion for books burning as strongly as ever, has joined the battle to keep libraries open across the US because :

Libraries raised me ... I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.

Here's Ray Bradbury live at The Beverly Hills Library, with other readers presenting extracts from We'll Always Have Paris :

Old Books in Manchester

One of the pleasures of my recent trip back to UK was meeting up with Rob Spence and his wife Elaine Ellery. Some of you will remember that Rob is a friend I met through this blog when he responded to a post I put up on Anthony Burgess. Rob subsequently came out to give a lecture on Burgess at Universiti Malaya, and a talk to Malay College Old Boys. It was also his idea to bring the International Anthony Burgess' Societies Sympozium here in July. (More about this later.) Well, I hadn't been up to Manchester in over two decades and was pleasantly surprised by the changes to the city centre. Victorian buildings have shed their grime and stand proudly next to gleaming modern structures, the shopping is pretty tempting, an efficient tram service will replace traffic clogged roads in the city centre, and it's a pretty happening place with plenty going on on the art's scene. Best of all, it takes less than two hours now from London via the super efficient Virgin trains. (Oh and I also hear they have a fairly good football club.) Ah, but the rain, it raineth every day ... so if you visit take a brolly. And then there are the libraries. Rob took me to the Portico Library for lunch since he is a member. It was opened in 1806, and most of the books on the shelves, which members are free to read, date from the (19th. (Rob did though point out some contemporary fiction, and of course the library also awards an annual literary prize and hosts other events.) Just look at these books in the section titled Polite Literature (presumably fiction that wouldn't scare the delicate young ladies!) Here's the ceiling ... This is Rob's hang-out place when he is in the city, and there is space for members to sit and read and work, and hsve a light meal. (The bean soup was so good, and the lady who made it had grown the beans in her own garden.) If I lived in Manchester this would be my second home But this isn't the only fascinating old library in Manchester. After lunch we visted a vertiable cathedral of books - the John Rylands Library which was founded by Enriqueta Rylands in memory of her husband, and built in the late (19th in the gothic style. There were a couple of excellent exhibitions, including one on the art of the sonnet. We chatted to one guy who was involved with restoring the antiquarian books. And finally, we made a quick detour into the Manchester Central library - where Rob bought me one of the coolest bookbags ever as a gift! Jealous? : There's another collection of books in Manchester left to talk about, but I'll post on that later. (More of my England trip photos on Facebook.)

North-South Divide in Reading Tastes

I was really quite intrigued to learn that what's termed The North-South Divide in Britain extends to choices in fiction too :

...with southerners slavishly following the recommendations of chatshow hosts Richard & Judy while northerners studiously ignore them ...

The Daily Telegraph reports that:

A study of (library) lending habits shows that Richard Madeley and his co-presenter and wife Judy Finnigan have had a "profound" effect on the books people choose to read. But while libraries across the south of England illustrate a dogged following of the couple's advice, further north, readers prefer crime thrillers and traditional romance novels. ... Books recommended by Richard & Judy accounted for more than 50 per cent of titles appearing in the list of the top 10 most borrowed books in London, the south east, south west and east Midlands. But none of the books they suggested appeared in the top 10 for Wales, the north east, northern Ireland, north west or Scotland. Readers in these areas preferred crime novels and thrillers by authors such as the American crime writers James Patterson and Michael Connelly.

But as Jack Malven in The Times points out, the power of Richard and Judy as arbiters of literary taste is on the wane :

During their heyday on Channel 4 they commanded the attention of 3 million viewers, but their move last year to Watch, a non-terrestrial channel, has reduced their audience to as little as 12,000 — fewer than a programme about train journeys in Switzerland.

Future Libraries

Librarians now find themselves having to act as guides not just to information itself, but to the myriad ways of accessing it that are available. In these libraries of the future, gone are the clichés represented by Philip Larkin and his "loaf-haired" secretary. Technology has unleashed the librarian and, in cyberspace, a new breed of librarians is giving a voice to ideas and worries about the changing nature of the profession.

Long Live the Library Revolution! says Adam O'Riordan on the Guardian blog. Although there have been plenty of prognostications about the future of the library in the information age, reinvention is in the air. The makeover extends to the librarian as much as the building. (In another alternative universe is librarian-me, who would have loved to have been part of all this change.)

But - I still think of libraries as places with those old-fashioned things called books in them, and when we lose that (which is happening in too many places, including here in KL) it is a tragedy.

(Pic shows Seattle's new library designed by Rem Koolhaas.)

New Ways to Tell Stories?

Following the announcement that the MIT Media Laboratory has announced the creation of the Center for Future Storytelling and will work collaborate with Plymouth Rock Studios :

... to revolutionize how we tell our stories ...

Sam Leith in the Telegraph writes a piece which seems to miss the point of the initiative entirely!

It isn't that stories are at risk. We will always need narrative. I don't believe books will die any more than he does. There clearly aren't more plots to invent. It isn't (of course) possible to "run out of narrative". And the Centre for Storytelling project seems to refer much more to the interface between film and the online world than it does to text based fiction.

I do totally agree with him though that :

... the internet does some things very well, and the codex book does other things very well. There is an overlap - they are both means of preserving and sharing information - but it's foolish to see the two as interchangeable, or the former as supplanting the latter.

But with computer technology there are new ways to tell stories, and fiction will become undoubtedly become more interactive and there will be more hybrid forms of storytelling. I don't know about you, but I feel excited about that.

I must say though, that I am horrified, along with Leith and Philip Pullman about the decision to close a school library with its books and librarian for a "virtual learning environment".

Super Geek's Super Library

It this the world's most incredible personal library? Jay Walker opens the door for the first time to Wired .

Walker is apparently a pioneer in the game of staking a claim to intellectual property on the Internet) and Forbes magagazine has referred to him as "the New Age Edison".

Nice to see he spends his billions on some thing as lovely as this!

Reading Room Opens for Business

I'm delighted to hear that Daphne Lee's children's library project is finally off the ground. I went around to see it a few months ago and found that she had created a very pleasant and welcoming space with well stocked shelves, in the midst of a rather run down highrise housing area in PJ Section 17.

And the kids who will benefit are undoubtedly those need it most.

This is the blurb from the Facebook group :

The Dram Projects Reading Room is a place where children can discover, nurture and indulge their love for books and reading. TDP firmly believes that children should be allowed to make their own reading choices and be offered a wide variety of reading material. Taking into consideration the high price of books, our reading room hopes to offer an alternative to public and school libraries, and reading in bookshops.

Comprising over a thousand books (and growing], our collection covers fiction and non-fiction titles, including picture books and reference material. Although the bulk of our books are for children and young adults, we also have a small but good selection of books for mature readers. Aside from providing a place where children are free to choose what they want to read, The Dram Projects Reading Room organises regular reading activities for children and young adults, like storytelling sessions and book groups.

You can find the library at BG-6 Happy Mansions, Jalan 17/13, Petaling Jaya, 46400 Selangor, Malaysia (016-328 1513 info@dramprojects.com)

And do go visit the blog.

A Fine Debate

Are Grafton, Wisconsin libraries going a little too far to get their library books back? Heidi Dalibor ignored letters telling her to return to library books (both Dan Brown novels), and the next thing she knew she was being handcuffed and lead away from her parents home. [Via]

Library fines have been the topic of hot debate in the UK, as Alison Flood reports in the Guardian, with anti-fine protesters calling charges for overdue books :

... punitive, old-fashioned and creating a negative impression of libraries

and ultimately alinienating users - at a time when reading has to be encouraged?

(There was more discussion of the issue on the Guardian blog.)

But what alternatives are there to fining? :

One librarian suggested adopting the ancient practice of some monasteries, in which monks who offended in the handling of books were publicly cursed. Another pointed to Soviet Russia, where they said that offenders' names were published in newspapers to shame them into returning their books. In New Zealand town Palmerston North next week, library users returning late books are being challenged to beat librarians on Guitar Hero to have their fines waived.

Perhaps you can think of some better ones?

Reading Clubs?

The National Library has started a National Reading Club, launched July 1st, to help inculcate the reading habit among Malaysians, A. Kathirasen in the New Straits Times reports. The National Library has something to celebrate, it's membership has been rising steadily :

In 1990, it had 128,045 members, rising to 460,000 in 2001. The latest figure (as at July 5) puts it at 788,541.

And the Unity, Culture, Arts and Heritage Minister Datuk Seri Shafie Apdal apparently said at the event that he would propose to the government that civil servants be given a book allowance, and he wants the private sector to do likewise.

Throughout the article it's rubbed in once again that Malaysians are failing miserably at becoming readers :

According to the national book policy target, germinated in 1984, the nation should have achieved reading society status in 2000. We are eight years overdue; and, it seems, nowhere near the target. ... The findings of a National Library survey, Shafie said, showed that only 13 per cent of 27 million Malaysians read books. ... Surely it is an indictment of our collective apathy and the failure of the hundreds of reading campaigns and book exhibitions.

But as we've said before many times on this blog - What (hundreds of) reading campaigns? (As Kathirasen very tactfully puts it, there :

... has been an inability to sustain the momentum of campaigns.)

None of my blog readers seem to know anything about them. The only thing I've personally seen to indicate a campaign going on is a single poster in the library of a single sekolah rendah. Surely the evidence of a reading campaign should be everywhere? This is pretty serious when you realise that a lot of taxpayers money is being spent. (We are probably more aware of the efforts of our southern neighbours than we are of our own. And look how much fun they make reading!)

Kathirasen goes on :

The government even declared 1988 The Year of the Reader. The campaign saw a flurry of activity, including the establishment of reading committees everywhere. What became of them?

Who knew anything about these "reading committees"? What were they supposed to achieve? What is a reading committee anyway?

Ministers and directors-general ordered their underlings to set up reading corners in all federal, state and district government offices. There were calls to set up reading corners aboard trains and xpress buses, and in estates, factories and homes. What became of them?

The people who are putting books into the hands of the public successfully are individuals who see it as a personal mission - people like Amir Muhammad with his great book giveaway at KLAB, the Malaysian Book Crossers who make reading free by "releasing books into the wild", Daphne Lee with her children's Reading Room in Section 17, our friend at Departure Lounge who has turned his cafe into a travel library, the teachers who have worked to make a difference in their own schools. We need more literary activists of this kind, small terrorist cells of book-lovers, making reading accessible, cheap and sexy.

Kathirasen gives some good suggestions for improving readership, but I do find it sad and depressing that hand-wringing articles like this appear in the newspapers at regular intervals. A lot of lip-service is paid, very little done that is effective.

I wish the National Library all the best with their National Reading Club, about which I cannot find any information on the internet beyond the fact of its launch. If there's anyone reading this who can enlighten us, please do get in touch and tell us about it.

For the Love of the Book

Our relationship with books is often complicated. Here are three recent articles from US newspapers well worth a read. :

Books entered my house under cover of night, from the four winds, smuggled in by woodland creatures, and then they never left. Books collected on every surface; I believe that somehow they managed to breed.

Take a wander around Luc Sante's book collection (left) in this very enjoyable piece from The Wall Street Journal.

I’m not suggesting that gigantic books are useful only as an excuse for avoiding responsibility.

You might not be so convinced as Joe Queenan talks about his love for big fat tomes in The New York Times.

I say: shore up the library. Stock it with printed matter. Reinforce its reading rooms. But don't think of it as a warehouse or a museum.

Robert Darnton looks at the future of the research library in the The New York Review of Books, and underlines the importance of the physical book even in this electronic age.

The Plymouth Bibliomaniac

When Alex Dove opened the 16th-century book on witchcraft, something black and scaly fell out into her hands.

Dove, who works in the books department at auctioneers Lyon &Turnbull, was horrified when she realised it was the body of a frog, wizened by time and pressed flat between the pages.

The books in question came from the library of one Robert Lenkiewicz, artist, and were sold on after his death in 2002. I didn't hear about the auction at the time, and in fact hadn't given Lenkiewicz much thought until I came across this piece by Alice Jones in the art section of The Independent today. During his lifetime Lenkiewicz failed to win acceptance among the art critics in London, but now, apparently, the value of his paintings is soaring, and I really am glad to hear that.

I lived in Plymouth in the late 1980's and have had a strong connection to the city ever since. (I still work for the same college.) It's impossible to visit the Barbican (the oldest part of the city surrounding the harbour) without coming across Lenkiewicz' work in galleries, restaurants, and on murals. And then of course there was his studio. We saw him sometimes standing before the open window, watching the street below, and almost biblical figure with flowing white hair and beard. At night when all else was dark, the lighted window showed a library of antiquarian books in rich bindings. I could not have guessed the extent of it.

But although there was a sign on a side door saying visitors to the studio were welcome to walk up, and though I very much wanted to, I lacked the courage to just walk upstairs and introduce myself. I regret that very much, even now.

Lenkiewicz was in every sense a much larger than life character, and he was also an incredible bibliomaniac :

He spent all the money he had (and plenty he didn't) on them, even doing a two-month sentence in Exeter prison for stealing four rare books from the Plymouth City Museum in the early 1970s. "Nobody really cared about them until four years later when the police came calling ... He came to the door and said, 'I've been expecting you, what took you so long? Do you take sugar in your tea?'"

He had, amongst so much else, one of the world's largest collections of antiquarian books relating to witchcraft and demonology. The whole collection is described in detail here. Do go take a stroll around it.

Did I mention the mummified bodies he kept in there too?

Nestling in a secret drawer, hidden behind some elaborate panelling at the bottom of a bookcase, was the embalmed corpse of a tramp. The Plymouth-based painter had befriended Edwin McKenzie – whom he dubbed Diogenes after he found him living in a barrel on a rubbish tip – and promised him that he would preserve his body after his death as a "human paperweight" rather than handing it over to the authorities for burial.

Return Them Books, Johoreans!

For those users of the Sultan Ismail Library in Johor Bahru who completely unclear on the concept, it works like this :

You go to a library to borrow books.

The last time I looked, the word "borrow" carried the meaning "keep temporarily and then return".

The Star reports today that of the 6,471 books borrowed from the library, only (wait for it) 40 have been returned, despite an amnesty campaign.

I talk a lot about the need for public libraries on this blog, but sometimes you have to think that folks just do not deserve them. Still, looking on the bright side, the library may beat the Pahang State Library for a place in The Malaysian Book of Records.

Jolly Molly, The Library Bus

The National Library of Singapore has a newly refurbished bus to serve as a mobile library for the "under-served" (e.g. children's homes, orphanages, special needs schools).

It really makes reading for kids look fun and funky! Are we jealous or what?

Check out the full story of Molly the Mobile Library Bus on Ivan's blog.

The Library That Can't Lend Books

This great distinction belongs to the KL Library which has been telling members since December 24th last year that they cannot borrow books because of "“technical problems” with the library’s computer system, according to the Star today. The library has not been able to process the books manually due to problems keeping track of the books.

Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur public and international relations officer Anwar Mohd Zain is quoted as saying that the system should be back up and working by the end of this month.

I can imagine a whole lot of frustrated readers out there ...

Note:

Talking about frustration, I'm not able to send or receive from my main email account at the moment. If you have sent me anything in the last 24 hours please could you send it to my yahoo account? : sharonbakar at yahoo dot com. Sorry for the inconvenience.