Times 28th Feb: Lynne Truss on public libraries

Writing in last Saturday's Times, Lynne Truss writes about the new Brighton public library , prompted by a item on the Radio 4 Today programme by Deborah Moggach. I missed this, part of the price of the long journey to work I do, (but not thank heavens for much longer) being that I don't listen to the radio in the morning. Ms Moggach was discussing what Ms Truss calls the "mixed media library". Ms Truss makes the point, familiar to any librarian who has had served in the trenches against architects, that those designing the splendid new building in Brighton had no idea how many books it was intended to house.
The more interesting point she makes, at least for me, is that, preparing a radio programme about Patrick Hamilton, the centenary of whose birth takes place this year and is to be marked at the Brighton Festival , she sent her producer to an unnamed public library. Hamilton was a fascinating writer whose work I admire hugely. Ms Truss claims that "nearly all his novels are out of print" and I shall check this, but believing this to be the case her producer went to the public library to find what they held. She says that no one had heard of him. This is perhaps not as shocking as the article claims. Hamlton, though excellent, is not one of the major twentieth century novelists, so it is not reasonable to expect an unqualifed library assistant to have heard of him, (though I deplore the supermarket tendency of some in my profession to treat collections as if they were no different from a freezer-full of fish fingers). What I find more worrying, though the piece is not explicit, is that no one seems to have offered to find out where his books might be found. If this was a London library, the Metropolitan Joint Fiction Reserve could have been suggested, if outside London other interlending schemes could have been used, local university library holdings could have been checked through COPAC and will admit bona-fide researchers. The British Library itself could have helped as a place of last resort. Why, if the account is correct did no one try to help her producer any further?
Truss, Lynne Shhh! If only you'd shut up you'd hear the books screaming
Times 28 Feb 2004 p 29