The Library

Knowledge was free. Turns out, that mattered.

There was a smell. I can’t fully describe it to you, but if you’ve ever walked into an old British public library — particularly one in the early 1970s — you already know exactly what I mean. It was paper and time and quiet ambition all rolled into one. Dust, perhaps. Wood. The faint ghost of someone else’s afternoon. Whatever it was, it hit you the moment you pushed open that door, and something in your chest just... settled.

I was around eleven, maybe twelve, and that library was a thirty-minute walk from our house. Thirty minutes there, thirty minutes back, and not a single penny changed hands. Not one. You could walk in off the street, a kid with scruffy shoes and absolutely nothing to his name, and leave with three books tucked under your arm like you’d just robbed the most civilised bank in England. Three weeks you had them. Three whole weeks of worlds you’d never visited, people you’d never meet, ideas that had absolutely no business landing in the head of a boy from wherever I was from.

I didn’t discriminate, either. Fiction one week, non-fiction the next. I was genuinely curious about everything, which looking back, was probably the best thing about me at that age. I hadn’t yet learned to be cool about it. I hadn’t yet figured out that boys weren’t supposed to be openly fascinated by things. So I just... was. Fascinated. Regularly and without apology.

The layout of that place stays with me too. Those massive rows of shelves, floor to ceiling, stretching away from you like corridors in a dream. You’d turn a corner and find an entire section on something you’d never considered before — geography, or astronomy, or the history of warfare, or how bridges were built — and suddenly an hour had gone. Just vanished. No one was chasing you out. No one was trying to sell you anything. It was, in the truest sense, free. Free to enter, free to explore, free to take something home and make it part of you for a while.

I think about that a lot now.

My books these days are digital. Mostly out of necessity... storage space in a modern life is a tyranny nobody talks about honestly enough. And I’m not going to pretend the convenience isn’t real, because it is. Thousands of titles in something the size of a thin notepad. I’m not a complete romantic about it.

But.

There is something missing. Something I can’t download. I look at people who have shelves, proper shelves heaving with real books, spines facing outward like a kind of personal autobiography of the mind, and I feel something I can only describe as a low, quiet envy. Not the bitter kind. The wistful kind. The kind that says I made different choices and I’m still not entirely at peace with them.

A real book has weight. Not just physically, though that matters more than we admit. It has the weight of someone having held it before you. It carries the fingerprints, sometimes literally, of every reader who came before. A digital book is yours alone, which sounds like a virtue until you realise it’s also a kind of loneliness.

That library in the early seventies asked nothing of me except that I bring the books back. It gave me the distinct impression that knowledge belonged to everyone, that it wasn’t gated behind price tags or postcode or the right kind of parents. It was just... there. Rows and rows of it, smelling of everything good and unhurried about the world.

I was eleven years old, and I didn’t know how lucky I was.

I’m telling you now, though. In case you needed reminding.

---

Until Next Time

LINKS

---