Libraries were once solemn places. In school, we were taken to the library once a week and allowed to browse around demarcated shelves, depending on our age and grade. Naturally, we always wanted to know what was on the other shelves and would try to find our way there surreptitiously. Those of us who had older siblings were not as curious as those who did not because those siblings brought home the ‘forbidden’ books each week and if we were particularly sycophantic and did our chores and theirs, we could get a chance to read something above our ‘level’.
The joy of being in the library was lost when we acquired class libraries. These had a selection of books we were meant to read and these were handed out to us each week without our partaking much in the process of deciding what we wanted. But even then, a book was a book — and we looked forward to opening it eagerly and losing ourselves within its pages. Nothing else came close to the wonder and magic of being transported into the world of fiction.
Of course, neither our school library nor our class library nor the shelves of books at home were enough to satisfy us. We wanted more. So we trotted off to the little marketplace from where we bought bread and milk and other necessities — and entered the hole-in-the-wall lending library there. There was barely any room to browse amid the cluttered shelves and there was definitely no room to sit down and pore over a book before we decided if we wanted to read it. Payments were made per day per book and though it was a miniscule amount by today’s standards, it went out of our precious pocket money and we had to make sure what we chose was money well spent.
That library made no effort to feed us with the classics and improve our reading skills or give us what we ought to be reading at our stage of life. It was just packed with best-sellers for all ages — and if we transgressed into age brackets not really meant for us, it was not the library owner’s problem.
We learnt a sure-fire way of choosing a book without spending too much time inside that tiny space and earning impatient looks from the checker at the counter. We just picked up the most thumbed through paperbacks from the shelf where we had found something interesting the previous time. Mostly, this worked. And that is how we got to go through the entire range of Agatha Christie, Oliver Strange and Zane Grey, before moving on to Ian Fleming, Daphne du Maurier and others when we were slightly older.
Libraries for us were therefore places where we mostly acted quickly and on-the-spot, only sometimes having researched earlier (word of mouth was our only recourse) and being able to come in and ask for a particular book.
Libraries today, whether in schools or colleges or private ones, are not like that now. They are proactive. They make things happen to inveigle prospective readers. Especially children — and for that, they have to tempt both parents and children.
So they have book releases, book readings and book clubs, writing and painting activities, they decide on the author to be read for the month or maybe a genre, they think up a historical event that could be covered by all the books possible written about it ... The amount of thought and ingenuity that goes into making the prospect of reading attractive seems way beyond the call of duty.
Add to that the energy and variety at global and local book fairs — it seems, like everything else, the approach to the written word too comes in a different avatar.
Cheryl Rao is a freelance journalist based in India.
