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The Library Book: A History of Service to British Columbia
Commissioned works don't always engage a wider audience. The Library Book: A History of Service to British Columbia (BC Library Association $50) is a welcome exception.
To mark the 100th anniversary of the B.C. Library Association, Dave Obee has told a fascinating tale of banned books, anti-communist witch hunts, skirmishes between libraries and dedicated souls who have served the province's book-lovers.
This is a large format book by and for book people, with plenty of illustrations, including incidental cartoons by Adrian Raeside.
Better still, The Library Book has pictures of bookmobiles. Lots of 'em.
There are bookmobiles wheezing up dirt roads in the Fraser Valley, edging along a snowy John Hart Highway (between Prince George and Dawson Creek) and stopped in the middle of nowhere, flagged down by eager readers.
When the Okanagan Regional Library retired its mobile unit in 1992, the North Shuswap hamlet of Celista took off the tires, put a flower box on the hood and made it a permanent branch.
As a boy I loved books and I loved trucks, so the bookmobile was second only to the ice cream truck in the pantheon of wheeled heroes.
Maybe Obee and book designer Roger Handling felt the same way.
Along with 2,500 other communities in the English-speaking world, Vancouver, Victoria and New Westminster launched their first true public libraries with seed money from U.S. tycoon Andrew Carnegie, who spent the last years of his life giving away some of the fortune he had amassed by paying steelworkers $10 for an 84-hour week and housing them in slums.
In an echo of that paternalism, the earliest lending libraries in remote parts of the province were often small book collections provided by employers in company towns and work camps.
It took the baroquely named Ethelbert Olaf Stuart Scholefield, B.C. provincial librarian at the beginning of the last century, to start the march toward organized public libraries throughout the province. The B.C. Library Association was launched at a meeting in his office.
He died in 1919, the year the Public Library Commission was created. It soon heard from book-hungry library trustees in Nanaimo, Duncan, Alberni and Sidney. All borrowed books from the Victoria library, to be exchanged four times a year, for a charge of $65 for every 100 books.
When Victoria's city council demanded more money from neighbouring municipalities for use of its library, Saanich and Esquimalt balked, and their residents were cut off. Monitors were posted to make sure interlopers from the suburbs didn't slip into the reading room.
Such internecine sniping dogged the fitful growth of library networks for decades. The PLC's decision in late 1929 to launch the world's first regional library network in the Fraser Valley angered other regions, especially the Okanagan and Vancouver Island.
The 1960s saw turf wars between the Greater Victoria board, which claimed dominion over all lands south of the Malahat, and the Nanaimo-based Vancouver Island Regional Library, which planted its flag as far southwest as Colwood.
Richmond was the biggest contributor to the Fraser Valley system until it pulled out in 1975, sparking a feud that took six months, a court action and a $100,000 payment to settle. Surrey soon withdrew as well, though with less rancour.
But infighting among libraries has often been overshadowed by conflicts with municipal politicians. The most notorious example of this was the firing of John Marshall, to which Obee devotes an entire chapter.
In 1954, with red-baiting at a fever pitch, the Victoria Public Library Board fired Marshall two months after he had been hired to launch a mobile book service.
No reason was given, but it soon emerged that some "public spirited citizens"; told the board that Marshall had worked for a leftist paper in Winnipeg and attended a Toronto peace conference widely believed to be a communist front.
The story hit the front pages and kept growing. Victoria Mayor Claude Harrison said he would happily burn any "subversive literature"; found on library shelves in his furnace. Author Roderick Haig-Brown called him a dimwit.
The B.C. Library Association passed a resolution condemning Marshall's firing, and its federal counterpart followed suit - prompting a Vancouver Sun editorial headlined: "No place for Reds in our public libraries.";
Half of the library's full-time employees resigned and for years the library had trouble attracting qualified staff.
Decisions on whether and where to build libraries and how much to spend on them have been political minefields. When it came time to relocate Vancouver's main branch to Burrard and Robson, some civic leaders expressed fears that the Downtown Eastside denizens who took refuge in the Carnegie building would do the same in the new library.
And when it moved again in 1995, to its $100-million home in Library Square, Vancouver Mayor Gordon Campbell was happy to cut the ribbon, but a year later he cut the budget, forcing the spiffy new library to shorten its hours.
Other dustups involved controversial books. In 1961 an RCMP officer arrived at the Vancouver library seeking to confiscate any copies of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.
"The only copy was a circulating copy
at my knees, under the desk, waiting to be picked up by the person who had asked for it,"; librarian Lois Bewley later recalled. "I thought, I'm damned if I'll give you a book.";
On the other hand, the Victoria library locked James Joyce's Ulysses in its vault from 1922 to 1949.
Do libraries have a future in the virtual universe? Absolutely, says Obee.
At its first meeting in 1927 the Public Library Commission mulled the possibilities of lending sheet music and phonograph records, and librarians have enthusiastically embraced every technological leap since then.
Pretty much every library in the country has Internet access, and many lend eBook download devices such as the Kobo. But it may be that the library's traditional charms-kindred souls in a relaxed sanctuary-will be valued
even more in an age of impersonal gadgetry.
As librarian and author Sarah Ellis puts it in her foreword: "We go because we like to browse shelves and check out the displays and people-watch. We go because it is free and fun and because the folks there seem pleased to see us. When it comes right down to it, we go there for the chairs."; 9780969261490
The Library Book is available online at: http://thelibrarybook.bclibraries.ca
Shane McCune writes from Comox.
[BCBW 2011]
To mark the 100th anniversary of the B.C. Library Association, Dave Obee has told a fascinating tale of banned books, anti-communist witch hunts, skirmishes between libraries and dedicated souls who have served the province's book-lovers.
This is a large format book by and for book people, with plenty of illustrations, including incidental cartoons by Adrian Raeside.
Better still, The Library Book has pictures of bookmobiles. Lots of 'em.
There are bookmobiles wheezing up dirt roads in the Fraser Valley, edging along a snowy John Hart Highway (between Prince George and Dawson Creek) and stopped in the middle of nowhere, flagged down by eager readers.
When the Okanagan Regional Library retired its mobile unit in 1992, the North Shuswap hamlet of Celista took off the tires, put a flower box on the hood and made it a permanent branch.
As a boy I loved books and I loved trucks, so the bookmobile was second only to the ice cream truck in the pantheon of wheeled heroes.
Maybe Obee and book designer Roger Handling felt the same way.
Along with 2,500 other communities in the English-speaking world, Vancouver, Victoria and New Westminster launched their first true public libraries with seed money from U.S. tycoon Andrew Carnegie, who spent the last years of his life giving away some of the fortune he had amassed by paying steelworkers $10 for an 84-hour week and housing them in slums.
In an echo of that paternalism, the earliest lending libraries in remote parts of the province were often small book collections provided by employers in company towns and work camps.
It took the baroquely named Ethelbert Olaf Stuart Scholefield, B.C. provincial librarian at the beginning of the last century, to start the march toward organized public libraries throughout the province. The B.C. Library Association was launched at a meeting in his office.
He died in 1919, the year the Public Library Commission was created. It soon heard from book-hungry library trustees in Nanaimo, Duncan, Alberni and Sidney. All borrowed books from the Victoria library, to be exchanged four times a year, for a charge of $65 for every 100 books.
When Victoria's city council demanded more money from neighbouring municipalities for use of its library, Saanich and Esquimalt balked, and their residents were cut off. Monitors were posted to make sure interlopers from the suburbs didn't slip into the reading room.
Such internecine sniping dogged the fitful growth of library networks for decades. The PLC's decision in late 1929 to launch the world's first regional library network in the Fraser Valley angered other regions, especially the Okanagan and Vancouver Island.
The 1960s saw turf wars between the Greater Victoria board, which claimed dominion over all lands south of the Malahat, and the Nanaimo-based Vancouver Island Regional Library, which planted its flag as far southwest as Colwood.
Richmond was the biggest contributor to the Fraser Valley system until it pulled out in 1975, sparking a feud that took six months, a court action and a $100,000 payment to settle. Surrey soon withdrew as well, though with less rancour.
But infighting among libraries has often been overshadowed by conflicts with municipal politicians. The most notorious example of this was the firing of John Marshall, to which Obee devotes an entire chapter.
In 1954, with red-baiting at a fever pitch, the Victoria Public Library Board fired Marshall two months after he had been hired to launch a mobile book service.
No reason was given, but it soon emerged that some "public spirited citizens"; told the board that Marshall had worked for a leftist paper in Winnipeg and attended a Toronto peace conference widely believed to be a communist front.
The story hit the front pages and kept growing. Victoria Mayor Claude Harrison said he would happily burn any "subversive literature"; found on library shelves in his furnace. Author Roderick Haig-Brown called him a dimwit.
The B.C. Library Association passed a resolution condemning Marshall's firing, and its federal counterpart followed suit - prompting a Vancouver Sun editorial headlined: "No place for Reds in our public libraries.";
Half of the library's full-time employees resigned and for years the library had trouble attracting qualified staff.
Decisions on whether and where to build libraries and how much to spend on them have been political minefields. When it came time to relocate Vancouver's main branch to Burrard and Robson, some civic leaders expressed fears that the Downtown Eastside denizens who took refuge in the Carnegie building would do the same in the new library.
And when it moved again in 1995, to its $100-million home in Library Square, Vancouver Mayor Gordon Campbell was happy to cut the ribbon, but a year later he cut the budget, forcing the spiffy new library to shorten its hours.
Other dustups involved controversial books. In 1961 an RCMP officer arrived at the Vancouver library seeking to confiscate any copies of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.
"The only copy was a circulating copy
at my knees, under the desk, waiting to be picked up by the person who had asked for it,"; librarian Lois Bewley later recalled. "I thought, I'm damned if I'll give you a book.";
On the other hand, the Victoria library locked James Joyce's Ulysses in its vault from 1922 to 1949.
Do libraries have a future in the virtual universe? Absolutely, says Obee.
At its first meeting in 1927 the Public Library Commission mulled the possibilities of lending sheet music and phonograph records, and librarians have enthusiastically embraced every technological leap since then.
Pretty much every library in the country has Internet access, and many lend eBook download devices such as the Kobo. But it may be that the library's traditional charms-kindred souls in a relaxed sanctuary-will be valued
even more in an age of impersonal gadgetry.
As librarian and author Sarah Ellis puts it in her foreword: "We go because we like to browse shelves and check out the displays and people-watch. We go because it is free and fun and because the folks there seem pleased to see us. When it comes right down to it, we go there for the chairs."; 9780969261490
The Library Book is available online at: http://thelibrarybook.bclibraries.ca
Shane McCune writes from Comox.
[BCBW 2011]
Submitted on September 1, 2011 in By David.
