Facebook makes good

A town has emptied its library in a bid to fight plans to close it down.

People in Stony Stratford, near Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, have spent the week withdrawing their maximum allowance of books in protest against council plans to close it as part of budget cuts.

And today they said the plan had been a success, with all 16,000 books withdrawn from the library.

Today, as they celebrated the empty shelves, Emily Malleson from Friends of Stony Stratford Library (FOSSL) said they were amazed at how everyone in the town had pulled together.

She said it was calculated that books were being checked out at a rate of around 378 per hour - smashing the usual rates. (the rest here)

[ achieved partly through an enterprising Facebook campaign]

books tomorrow, books yesterday

My books used to be distributed as follows: 10% chez moi. 5% in my mother's house in Chevy Chase (where they ended up after a disastrous spell in New York). 40% in my ex-husband's basement in Leeds. 40% in storage in London.

The 40% in London were the only ones off-site that I could do anything about, so from time to time I would visit my storage unit in Bow and try to reduce the number that had to be brought from London to Berlin. At one point I went through boxes and filled a suitcase with rejects (I think I had ended up somehow with three copies of DeLillo's White Noise, for instance, and the copy in Berlin (acquired because the other two were in storage) was all I really needed); I then took the suitcase to my local Idea Store (formerly known as the library). I explained to a member of staff that I would like to donate books. She was appalled. She then said, Well, she would take a look - taking pity on me because I had dragged this heavy suitcase over.

We went to a conference room and opened the suitcase; she explained apologetically that "they" would not like having a lot of books come in. But she looked through the books, and she thought there were many that readers might like, that she herself might like, and perhaps, she said, the main branch in Bethnal Green might take some, so she agreed to accept them.

Today I read:

Expenditure on books in our libraries is below 8% of the total public library funds, and in inner London that figure is just 5.7% (across the country, councils spend just 1.6% of their funding on children's books; several councils, Hackney and Doncaster among them, spend less than 1%). As a consequence, many libraries now have extremely poor book stocks. In 1996/7 there were 92.3m books available for lending in the UK; in 2007/8 that figure fell to 75.8m. The result of this is that fewer people borrow books – at some councils the number of book loans to adults has fallen below 2.5 a year – at which point it is very easy for a council to claim a library is poorly used and should be closed down.

Rachel Cooke on British libraries here.

(Cooke has actually visited my local Idea Store!)