My Favourite Library

Fanfare! Into the Ether

The Music Has Stopped, But The Shows Go On

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Inspired by @Sea-shore thread 'Top 10 Bookshops'. I was thinking about the first library I ever joined. It was Pimlico Library in Rampane street in London. There was an alcove on the second floor that looked out onto the road, and you could take a cushion and just sit and read. I read so many middle grade fantasy books in that alcove. I remember shunning friends just to go to the library and read. I would spend a good three hours at a time there. I think it shut down now.


https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipe...rary_Entrance_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1194292.jpg
 
It's a small world coincidence! I was one of the team that established Pimlico Library, when I worked for Westminster City Library Service from 1972-1976. It was a thrill buying the books and processing them for the shelves. They were stored all over the place, wherever other branches had space, while the building was being erected.

Most of the accessioning took place in the basement of Church Street Library, which was near to the renowned street market in Marylebone. This caused an unusual and rather creepy problem, in that there were a lot of cockroaches in the area, attracted there by discarded waste food. Hordes of them invaded the boxes of books, apparently hooked on fresh paper and binding glue. This created a terrible stink, many of the books were ruined by staining and had to be thrown away. Sitting there in the quiet of an evening, giving books Dewey classification numbers, I could hear hundreds of cockroaches rustling through the pages. The memory of this eerie susurration has never left me.

We did lots of publicity for the new library, which in those pre-Internet days meant delivering hundreds of flyers through doors and doing radio and newspaper interviews. Pimlico was quite run-down in the 70's, with some vacant lots still showing bomb damage from the war 30 years before. It was just beginning a process of gentrification, and our library was a much-needed facility. Moving thousands of books into the building was satisfying, and rather did my back in! To see the place looking pristine, not a book out of place, all fresh and unused was a librarian's wet dream....

Opening day was a riot. We were invaded. I've never seen so many people in a library. By the end of the day, the only books left on the shelves were five foreign language novels. Everything else had been borrowed, and we had to scurry around other branches to get replacement stock for our second day. It took about a week for things to calm down.
 
Inspired by @Sea-shore thread 'Top 10 Bookshops'. I was thinking about the first library I ever joined. It was Pimlico Library in Rampane street in London. There was an alcove on the second floor that looked out onto the road, and you could take a cushion and just sit and read. I read so many middle grade fantasy books in that alcove. I remember shunning friends just to go to the library and read. I would spend a good three hours at a time there. I think it shut down now.

What a nice childhood memory! Thanks for sharing. :)

Here are the world's most spectacular libraries and not a cushion in sight - disappointing.

The most spectacular libraries in the world

Moral: never judge a library by the building, or a book by the cover (except that everyone does :p)

PS It's weird when you see a place in your head and find it exists in real life. Admont Abbey, Austria is just how I pictured the setting of my scene in the Tall Towers (Last Sorceress of Solara). Now I can get more descriptive words seeing it in a photo. Yes!
 
It's a small world coincidence! I was one of the team that established Pimlico Library, when I worked for Westminster City Library Service from 1972-1976. It was a thrill buying the books and processing them for the shelves. They were stored all over the place, wherever other branches had space, while the building was being erected.

Most of the accessioning took place in the basement of Church Street Library, which was near to the renowned street market in Marylebone. This caused an unusual and rather creepy problem, in that there were a lot of cockroaches in the area, attracted there by discarded waste food. Hordes of them invaded the boxes of books, apparently hooked on fresh paper and binding glue. This created a terrible stink, many of the books were ruined by staining and had to be thrown away. Sitting there in the quiet of an evening, giving books Dewey classification numbers, I could hear hundreds of cockroaches rustling through the pages. The memory of this eerie susurration has never left me.

We did lots of publicity for the new library, which in those pre-Internet days meant delivering hundreds of flyers through doors and doing radio and newspaper interviews. Pimlico was quite run-down in the 70's, with some vacant lots still showing bomb damage from the war 30 years before. It was just beginning a process of gentrification, and our library was a much-needed facility. Moving thousands of books into the building was satisfying, and rather did my back in! To see the place looking pristine, not a book out of place, all fresh and unused was a librarian's wet dream....

Opening day was a riot. We were invaded. I've never seen so many people in a library. By the end of the day, the only books left on the shelves were five foreign language novels. Everything else had been borrowed, and we had to scurry around other branches to get replacement stock for our second day. It took about a week for things to calm down.

Wow, thank you so much for sharing that memory Paul, it means a lot. You can find heros in unusual places, even basements in Church Street!!

I remember playing in the bomb sites off Victoria St. in the early 70's and lilliton terrace. We would scour the bombed out basements for bags of coal and try and sell it in the market, until the police would chase us off.

You know, we all have friends that tell tall stories? Well we had a boy in our gang who swore blind he found a cannon that fell from a Meschersmitt and crashed into one of the houses, in Lillington terrace, and he sold it in the market? He was about 10 and the cannon would have been half a ton at least.

Pimlico library was truly a refuge for me.
 
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Fanfare! Into the Ether

The Music Has Stopped, But The Shows Go On

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