Wasn’t it great, as a child, when we all shuffled off to the school library to borrow books? I didn’t care at all about the fact I’d have to write book reports (since I enjoyed those), I just wanted to read more books. And every trip to the library meant more books to read! It’s a big quaint looking back as an adult on the idea of little me borrowing from a no-doubt heavily gatekept collection of books, but in those days I always found something I enjoyed and read it from cover to cover.
Thats a recent shot of the library from my second primary school, St Joseph’s. I was at that school between the ages of about 7 to 11 and those were probably the formative years of my reading. I recall the short stacks for the ‘little kids’ (probably me at the start!) and then once you reached a certain age you upgraded to the taller stacks. I used to like book series in those days, and borrowed lots of Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and related books, as well as many classics like as Stevenson, Dahl, Dickens and Jules Verne. We had a list of books from which we had to borrow a certain amount (and review it), but I don’t remember every reading anything I wasn’t interested in.
I also borrowed anything like this (including this very volume):
I enjoyed fantasy, horror and sci-fi from a very early age (this was post Star Wars of course) but didn’t find much beyond the classics at school. I’d borrow those genres in abundance from the public library! However our weekly school library visit would include a sort of book discussion with the teacher and I very strongly recall one of these was about classic monsters (werewolves, vampires, frankenstein etc) which made me view that guy in a different light.
St Joseph’s was also when the Scholastic Book Club started (for me) which led to the Fighting Fantasy book obsession, which dovetailed into even more fantasy reading. I recall we read The Hobbit as a class book one year at St Joseph’s but I had already read it and I believe had even struggled with The Lord Of The Rings as a young child. When they were amongst the only fantasy in the school library I didn’t have a choice! I recall my Hobbit book review was full of drawings of runes and elvish script. (Wouldn’t it be great if I still had that and could scan and blog it?)
That’s the school library of my (juniour) high school St Mary’s. It’s a recent photo and shows that it has changed significantly. It’s brighter and contains far less stacks and books than it once did, and in my day was more of a (small) book dungeon heavily stocked with ‘important’ works of literature such as a budding mind may be expected to ingest. This was high school, and we had started things like Shakespeare, the english poets and Australian literature and the library was heavily stocked with this sort of thing.
But it still had a few of the sorts of genre books one may expect – such as John Wyndham’s works – as well as a section that was a mishmash of strange uncategorizable books (possibly donations thinking back on it) from which one time I borrowed this:
These were the days in which the Guinness Book Of Records was still a phenomenon and it was perhaps not surprising that the wretched TV show spawned a book series (6 volumes!). I remember this book in particular since it had been heavily annotated by a previous reader who expressed their skepticism at most of the contents. This puzzled me (“Who would write in a book?”) and eventually would inspire me (I later used to do the same thing, leaving occasional reviews of novels in the blank final pages.) and, thirty-five years later, has apparently stuck with me.
On my recent visit to Australia I was talking with Kirsten about the library at St Francis Xavier’s – my high school she now teaches at. I have very dim memories of the place – possibly only going when required to – and if it contained any popular literature at all I don’t recall. I studied advanced English courses in high school and (had to) read a lot of material for the courses, but I believe I either bought the books outright or borrowed them from public libraries. This was the only time in my life I recall reading books I had no interest in, which was of course tempered by simultaneous reading of the stuff I did like (fantasy and horror in those days mostly). I wrote a book review in year 12 of a Graham Masterton novel and my teacher essentially forced me to read F Scott Fitzgerald for the next review which irritated me a little 🙂
It’s not that I didn’t visit the SFX Library, it’s just that I don’t recall borrowing much. There were study rooms in the back I used to occasionally use, and I think we sometimes held student council meetings in a library room. The books though… I think I mostly ignored them.
That’s the library at my Australian university, known as the ‘Auchmuty library’. For a few years I had schedules with massive gaps between classes, and spend vast amounts of hours in this library. The basement stacks were a goldmine of unusual books including loads of genre pulp (much of which I ignored in those days…) and – to my eternal joy – a voluminous collection of Lovecraftian hardcovers. Looking back I imagine this was the Akham House output from the early days, and I imagine it’s proximity to the pulp was perhaps because it was a collection donated by a fan of the weird fiction of the 60s/70s (which in those days included the Conan, Tarzen and John Carter series). I was still to naive and inexperienced to recognize this fact, but I did read all of the Lovecraft stuff, including the books of his letters and related musings. My memories of Newcastle University are still strongly intermingled with my fandom of the Lovecraft Mythos, and I wonder if all those books are still hidden in the basement of that library?
I could go on and on about libraries – Charlestown Public Library deserves a post of it’s own – since they almost certainly helped foster not just my love of books but my love of book collecting as well. But that’s enough for now 🙂
If I may add a few things…
Infants school: You couldn’t borrow a book on library day unless you’d brought your library bag to protect it. These were made of a thick material (usually very colourful and possibly bearing your name), with a drawstring at one end.
Primary school: It was all about the series, e.g. Alfred Hitchcock’s The Three Investigators, and who finished every volume first. I kind of regret not taking my time to properly enjoy these titles, rather than madly racing my mates.
Junior high: Library helpers were rewarded with a canteen-supplied morning tea once per month that included chocolate milk and pink-iced finger buns. They had to do a lot of recess and lunch shifts to earn a seat at the feast, though.
Senior high: Because timetables varied so much from student to student and some people had legitimate free periods, you could skip a class by going to the library and, if questioned, saying you had an f/p and were “studying”.
University: For you, old mate, it was the Lovecraftian works. For me, it was the specialty journals and more highbrow rags like “New Statesman” and “The Spectator”. I’d grab three or four new arrivals from the stand, find a padded chair and spend hours challenging my mind with unfamiliar language and ideas. I once rocked up to a geography exam having done almost no preparation. Fortunately, I’d just read an article that perfectly fitted one of the essay topics. Got a credit 🙂