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I
t doesn’t take much to please us here at Mediawatching Towers, but there are very few things that make us happier than someone else doing most of the work for us. So, thank you to Maurice Wakeham and Alan Bullimore, who between them have supplied enough library-related news to almost fill a page. Maurice draws our attention to one specific week during lockdown when libraries were very much in the news – the week in questions was 25-31 May. First of all was a presentation led by John Simpson as part of the Hay Festival, which featured libraries that had been destroyed – Bucharest, Sarajevo and Mosul were among the examples under discussion. The online event allowed for public participation, and perhaps unsurprisingly there was some chat with regard to the closure of libraries in the UK. The following day was all about The Case of Charles Dexter Ward – a Radio 4 adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft locked room mystery. The titular character goes missing from his room in a Rhode Island institution. The BBC version updates the story and sees a pair of journalists attempting to solve the mystery. Part of their search for the truth leads them to look at his school library reading records.
Also on Radio 4 that week was a book serialisation of A Run in The Park, by David Park. Centred around a group of running novices who create a group to help them train for a 5km parkrun. Maurice notes that: “The author obviously has inside information about libraries today, revealing through one character that they are not just about books, certainly not about stamping books, that nobody reads the classics, the computers are in constant use and some users mistake the librarians for social workers. Perhaps that’s just good research.”
Still on Radio 4 and this time it was Front Row “talking to Walter Iuzolinno about a new project involving translated books which is launching with a book featuring a librarian who collects discarded manuscripts.”
June-July 2020
Dominic Raab with some of his heroes and influences.
Maurice concludes by saying: “Then I switched on part way through an episode of Michael Wood’s TV series, Story of England, to find him sitting in Dr Williams’s Library in Bloomsbury talking to David Wykes about materials the library had been donated from the Kibworth Academy.”
Moving on to Alan Bullimore’s contribution, which is about punk impresario Malcolm McLaren. The former Sex Pistols manager died 10 years ago in April, and a new biography was released to mark the anniversary. The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, by Paul Gorman, is definitely comprehensive at 880 pages long. Alan says: “McLaren was a keen library fan. He stood for Mayor of London and advocated that libraries should be licenced to sell alcohol. “This is mentioned, together with a few other library anecdotes on the author’s blog (
www.paulgormanis. com/?p=22729).”
And although these mentions of libraries hasn’t quite managed to fill the pages, Maurice did leave us with one additional tidbit to ease the burden on Mediawatching. He introduced his email with the following: “No doubt given the number of home bookshelves we are seeing on our screens during the lockdown you will have several people analysing these.”
And it is true that lockdown has done funny things to live television interviews. In the olden days (prior to 23 March 2020) an interview required a studio, a presenter and a team of technicians – now all that is required is a phone, a headset and of course a bookshelf to provide a suitable backdrop.
There will likely be dissertations and PhDs written about the contents of those bookshelves, but so far none of Mediawatching’s avid readers have offered any in-depth analysis. Fortunately there are newspapers to do that sort of thing (or Twitter if you like your analysis with more vitriol). But for now try The Guardian (
https://bit.ly/2VTKCZX), FT (
https://on.ft.com/38y6mzA), or for a more “academic” exploration try the Evening Standard’s coverage – which begins with Ben Fogle’s colour-coded bookshelves. Dominic Raab’s hastily arranged books on a windowsill remain Mediawatching’s personal favourite.
Which leaves us with just enough space to mention Newmarket Library, which hit the headlines after a weekend deep-clean left librarians with a little extra sorting one Monday morning. Cleaners did a sterling job of ensuring books were thoroughly disinfected before putting them back on to shelves – in size order (
https://bit.ly/3f7JdX2). IP
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