Society
They wanted me to write a piece on libraries in light-hearted style - and there would be no fee
Published 02 August 1999
I was sitting quietly at my desk three months ago, wondering whether to finish a longish article on English identity in Prospect or get back to spring-cleaning the grill pan, when the editor of the Library Gazette rang to ask how I'd feel about writing for the September edition of his journal.
He'd heard me chatting on the wireless about my early days as a librarian and thought I'd be the ideal person to write 750 "light-hearted" words for the column opposite the editorial page, called "Shelf Life".
No, he didn't have any particular subject in mind, but the piece should have some reference to libraries and be written in the "light-hearted style" adopted by previous columnists. And that, he thought, was more or less it. Except for one thing. "I'm afraid we have a policy of not paying contributors."
As usual in such situations, I toyed with the idea of saying that this policy had a certain elegant complementarity with my own long-standing principle of refusing to work for nothing, but it seemed safer to keep quiet about hard cash. Someone, somewhere in the library service, might still be repeating the rumour that my rapid departure from Liverpool public libraries in the early sixties had less to do with a new career path than with the head librarian's suspicion that I was associated with the sharp drop in the proceeds that the library collected from overdue books.
I duly sent off my copy this Monday. It wasn't one of my finer pieces - certainly not good enough to cut out after publication and store in the box file on top of the bookcase that I've rather childishly labelled "Best Bits". But it had a relatively amusing story about a Fabian librarian I'd once worked for who used to try to raise intellectual standards among the working class of Liverpool by refusing to hand over Netta Muskett and Ruby M Ayres novels to little kids who'd been sent along to collect another "romance".
"Tell your mother to try this instead," he'd say, reverently sliding over Anna Karenina. (The kids had long ago got used to this ploy and would disappear round the block for five minutes and then return with their Tolstoy and say that mam had already read it.)
On Tuesday the editor rang to acknowledge receipt of my copy and say that the piece was somewhat below the usual standards of "Shelf Life". Although he appreciated my efforts to be light-hearted, he'd found the story about the Fabian librarian rather patronising and been singularly unamused by my account of how I used to visit the Picton Library in Liverpool with a gang of fellow sixth-formers, ask a young female librarian for a book on the first world war and then stand below the circular metal stairways as she went to retrieve it in the hope of getting what we called in those innocent days a "quick knicker flash".
"None of us in the office found that exactly light-hearted."
As anyone who was ever turned down by the fat, spotty girl in an adolescent game of postman's knock will recognise, there is nothing quite so infuriating as being rejected by someone previously regarded as a worthy charity. Nor was that the first time I'd been humiliated by a member of the library profession. There'd been that occasion, years ago in Liverpool, when I'd been rejected for promotion after failing a Dewey classification test. But at least then there'd been some redress. One could forget almost any professional setback when there was the immediate prospect of a big night out financed entirely with eight half-crowns newly nicked from the fines drawer.
Now, that was light-hearted.
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