Love letters to libraries: share your tribute to your favourite
From places to go for kindly advice to havens of hush, libraries play a special role in cultural life. With councils up and down the country sharpening the axe, Book Week Scotland has launched a campaign to get readers to write love letters to their favourite temple of reading.
Only this week, the city of Liverpool cancelled the closure 11 of its 18 libraries following protests – and a “love letter” – by 500 writers, actors, artists, musicians, illustrators and educators. It’s no secret that libraries are in danger – not just in the UK, where hundreds face closure, but all over the world, as the digitalisation of reading and media pushes them down the the priority lists of many councils.
It’s a perfect moment, then, for Book Week Scotland to launch a campaign asking readers to send love letters to their favourite library, where they will be displayed. Many high-profile authors have also joined the campaign, and their letters will be published exclusively in the Guardian.
But let’s shine the spotlight on the people to whom libraries matter most, their readers. Beyond the essential role of giving free access to culture, what does your library mean to you personally? What memories do you have from them? Perhaps your love of reading started there, you spent countless hours studying in them, made new friendships or discovered great books in them? Does your library have any special features, or a special role in your community?
Wherever you are in the world, share your love for these institutions by composing a letter – be it typed, handwritten or read out loud. Whatever the format, you can share your photos, videos and stories with us by clicking on the blue “Contribute” buttons. Or if you’re out and about you can download the GuardianWitness app or look for our assignments in the new Guardian app. And, while you’re at it, why not share it with them in the form of an actual letter too?
Here are 10 classic quotes to get your inspiration going
Without libraries we have no past and no future.” – Ray Bradbury
A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them.” – Mark Twain
With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one – but no one at all – can tell you what to read and when and how.” – Doris Lessing
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” – Jorge Luis Borges
The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.” – TS Eliot
I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.” – Virginia Woolf
The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.” – Albert Einstein
Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.” – Walter Cronkite
I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.” – Maya Angelou
People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.” – Saul Bellow
No comments:
Post a Comment