Beautiful Libraries & Travel Dreams by Catherine Hokin

Like every writer I know, I am wedded to libraries and bookshops and, ten weeks into this strange new world we are now living in, I am missing my regular haunts.

I have two libraries I regularly spend time in - my local university library in Glasgow and the Wiener Holocaust Library in London - and too many virtual ones to count. Independent bookshops in Glasgow are, unfortunately, thin on the ground but Edinburgh is only a hop away and we have a suitably eccentric second-hand bookshop at the bottom of our road that I really hope survives the current closures.

 El Ateneo Grand Splendid Bookstore - Flickr

Travel seems a long way away but I have been digging through the photos and planning trips, and libraries and book stores are always part of the itinerary. Last year, while researching my novel The Fortunate Ones, I was lucky enough to visit Buenos Aires and the incredible El Ateneo Grand Splendid. This bookshop was built in 2000 inside the Grand Splendid Theatre which itself opened in 1919. The shop retains many parts of the original theatre, including the stage - which is now a cafe - the balconies and boxes and even the red curtains. I have never seen a shop like it, and we lost hours in there.

 Washington National Library - my picture

A few months before that, I was in Washington where I almost broke my neck craning for a better view of the magnificent ceilings in the Library of Congress.The decoration is breath-taking, the library is in the Beaux Art style which means it is theatrical and heavily ornamented. It was the largest library in the world when it opened in 1897, and still is. Its collections number more than 170 million items and that number is constantly growing - about 10,000 items are added to its lists every working day.

The Library of Congress is, however, a long way from being the world's oldest library. That honour falls to the Library of Ashurbanipal, which was founded in Ninevah in modern day Iraq in the seventh century BC. The ancient world also housed the legendary Library of Alexandria which attracted scholars from around the Mediterranean until it was destroyed by fire - either in 48 B.C., 270 A.D or at the end of the fourth century depending on which record you read. The oldest surviving library collection - roughly 1800 scrolls - dates from 79 A.D and was discovered in the Villa of the Papyri when Herculaneum was excavated in the eighteenth century. The scrolls were blackened and carbonized after spending so long entombed in the mud and ash left by the volcanic eruption which buried Herculaneum along with Pompei. Much of the catalogue has yet to be deciphered, but studies have already revealed that the library contains several texts by an Epicurean philosopher and poet named Philodemus.

Libraries have always been viewed as an essential part of our world and I, for one, cannot wait to walk into one and breathe that special printed page smell again. We are currently, I think, evaluating many of the things that are important to us, and I hope libraries continue to get the support and funding they, and we, need. In a time of fake news and sometimes too fast news, they have never been more essential to us - libraries provide equality of information and they are the custodians of truth. They are also, many of them, stunning works of art in their own right. I am sure many readers of this blog have their own favourites - Trinity College Library in Dublin is another of mine - but the following pictures are top of my my wish list. As soon as the world opens up again, I'm on my way...

Royal Library, El Escorial, Madrid, Flikr

 George Peabody Library, Baltimore, Wikicommons

The lifeline of libraries in an age of loneliness by Fay Bound Alberti

On Twitter this week, the writer Neil Gaiman responded to the debate on libraries’ decline. Rejecting claims that libraries were obsolete, he suggested that they are actually “more relevant and useful than they were 30 years ago”. He’s right, and not only because libraries lend books. 

Libraries have political, social, emotional and educational relevance. Their history is long and complex. The earliest libraries, based on cuneiform script on clay tablets, date back to 2600 BCE. They recorded mostly business transactions and inventories of goods. Over 30,000 clay tablets from the 2600 year old Library of Ashurbanipal remind us that the Middle East was, for centuries, a global centre of knowledge and education in medicine, art and culture. 

In the sixth century, the great libraries of the Mediterranean world were Constantinople and Alexandria. Egypt's Library of Alexandria is the most famous library of Classical antiquity. Dedicated to the Muses, the nine goddesses of the arts, the library was patronised by the Ptolemaic dynasty and a global site of scholarship from the 3rd century BC until the Roman Conquest. Filled with papyrus scrolls, the Library is most famous now for having burned down, resulting in a devastating loss of treasures. 

The Library of Alexandria

In the ancient world, libraries were a means to announce power, status, identity and civic pride; the same drive that was behind the expansion of libraries in the Enlightenment West. This so-called golden age of libraries saw many important European libraries being founded. The British Library was established in 1753 and Chetham's Library in Manchester, said to be the oldest public library in the English-speaking world, opened in 1653. The Mazarine Library and the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève were also founded in Paris and the Austrian National Library in Vienna. 

An aisle of Chetham's Library, Manchester

The principal of libraries being open to the public was increasingly commonplace, reflecting their educational and civil status. Knowledge mattered; to be seen to be knowledgable arguably mattered more. Where once libraries open to the public had chained their books to the desks, the principle of lending libraries provided a means for people to carry that learning into their own homes, providing they had enough literary, space and leisure time. 

The Public Libraries Act of 1850 gave local boroughs the power to establish lending libraries, while the Education Act of 1870 expanded literacy. These two moments connected the desire for civic pride to the equally strong desire to educate the working classes, and to encourage their leisure time to be both clean and moral. Libraries represented civility and the pursuit of knowledge for social advance, and for its own sake.

What has changed? Why are libraries no longer seen as crucial to the social fabric, and therefore not worthy of investment? Why have there been such massive cuts to library budgets since 2010? 

Leaving aside the social indifference of successive Tory governments, and the wholesale impoverishment of institutions and structures that represent collective interest (the NHS, state schools, care homes), there is no longer any definitive sense of what kind of knowledge matters. In the age of Trump there has been a movement away from intellectual reason towards primitive impulse; we might argue that this precondition allowed Trump's rise, rather than being a direct result of his presidency. 

But there are other reasons too, including a lack of financial investment and support. Part of the reason why libraries are supposedly in decline is the growth of digitisation. More resources online, it is argued, provides better access than outdated buildings, with limited books; it also eliminates the problems of access: geographical, economic, physical. But not everyone has access to reliable internet resources. Books and papers and physical objects are critically needed in countries with dodgy internet connections and limited electricity. 

Besides, libraries are not just spaces to hold books. They are filled with insightful librarians and curators, who can link you to the source that you need (and even borrow it from other libraries); perhaps not as quickly as Google, but certainly with more humanity.

As a girl growing up in rural Wales, the weekly visit across the border to Shropshire town of Oswestry and its library, gave me hope. Searching the shelves, feeling limitless as my gaze drifted from Mills and Boon to Shakespeare, from Dryden’s poetry to local history, there were options available to me. Potential and places that reached beyond the narrowness of the shelves and the chlorine smell of the nearby municipal pool.

Oswestry Library

As a lonely child with a difficult family life, I treasured those moments of escape. I loved everything about the routine: the piling up of six books - SIX! - with their tattered and grubby plastic covers, cherry-picked from a dozen different shelves; queuing for the librarian; smiling as she expressed interest (or sometimes shock) in what I was choosing; watching as she flicked through the pages to find the sweet spot and oh the muffled clunk of the date stamp, those were physical moments of bliss. 

Carrying that stack home, holding it on my lap as a shield that protected me from the inevitable arguments of the car that backfired, squirrelling it up in my room where I could smell the pages and look at all the different people who had borrowed each book before me - or the joy of being the one single stamp of newness - was a special kind of bliss. I belonged to a community of readers who stretched beyond the narrow, sad confines of my bedroom. 

And for me that is the point. Libraries are far more than buildings to hold books. They are pivots of connections between individuals and the world outside; not only in the date stamps that nestle aside one another, but also in a more literal, physical way. Libraries are spaces where anyone can go, to browse, to sit, to read the newspapers they can't afford to buy, to keep warm, to think, to meet other people. And in an age of loneliness this collective, free-to-use space is crucially important, and critically endangered. 

Books bring people together, literally, figuratively, physically. When we imagine that libraries aren’t needed, and we allow governments to shut them down on the basis they aren’t viable, or God forbid necessary, we toe a line of individualism that weakens society as a whole. 

I don’t use libraries like I did when I was a child, though half the adult population do. I did try, when my own children were younger, and the weekly run to the library to perform those rituals of choosing, carrying, stamping (and inevitably mislaying) are treasured moments of motherhood for me. The moments of drawn out time are a distant memory for me - and no doubt for many, caught up in our technologically driven, imperative age where every second counts, and Amazon Prime has a same day delivery option. 

The depressing thing about libraries closing down is that lack of use becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; an ideological sleight of hand by which cut backs appear justified. Deprive public libraries of millions of pounds to buy resources, to fund decent opening hours and enough staff, and people inevitably spend less time there. Create a narrative of decline and obsolescence and libraries become - especially the local, public libraries that sustained me as a child, redefined as an unnecessary and unsustainable expense. 

Communities need libraries. Like they need hospitals and schools and roads and utilities. Libraries are spaces of learning and information, yes, but they are also spaces of acceptance and belonging and engagement in ways that are neglected in the 21st century. Many libraries are changing to adapt to the needs of their users; some have knitting circles and board game groups, tea mornings and yoga alongside Harry Potter and Pride and Prejudice. And adaptation may be key to this survival. But don't let people say libraries don't matter. They have never mattered more. 

My new book, A Biography of Loneliness will be published in Spring 2019 by Oxford University Press. 

You can follow my blog and website for updates: 

www.fayboundalberti.com

The Public Part of UK Author Earnings - Katherine Roberts

April 6th marks the start of a new financial year, and I have a new History Girls post to write... so you can probably guess what this one is going to be about! In the same way that I find it impossible to create anything while I'm thinking about money, I also find it impossible to blog about creativity. Instead, I thought I'd show you a graph from my finance file that counts as vaguely historical since it covers my 14-year career to date (and that feels like a long time in publishing these days).

UK library loans of my books (Year 2000 - 2013)

In case you can't read the figures up the left hand side, these show the approximate lifetime loans for my books. Years are across the bottom, and book titles are written on the curves. Here they all are, listed in order of popularity:

The Great Pyramid Robbery - 56,000 loans (heading off the top of the graph)
Spellfall - 35,800
Song Quest - 28,000
The Babylon Game - 20,000
The Mausoleum Murder - 18,800
The Amazon Temple Quest - 17,200
The Olympic Conspiracy - 15,000
Crystal Mask - 12,900
The Colossus Crisis - 8,000
The Cleopatra Curse - 8,000
I am the Great Horse - 6,800
Sword of Light - 5,500
Dark Quetzal - 5,400
Lance of Truth - 200

Notes:
1) Figures correct to June 2013, as reported by the UK Public Lending Right office.
2) My final two Pendragon titles Crown of Dreams and Grail of Stars are not shown on this graph, since they both published in 2013.
3) Data is not gathered from every library every year. Each year a different sample of UK libraries is taken, and the results are scaled up to account for the whole country - this means it's possible zero loans can show for a book that actually loans quite well in the author's local library, whereas a sample taken from an author's local library where their books are popular might skew figures for that year the other way. (Over time, though, the sampling system should be fair to authors wherever they live.)

You would probably expect books with earlier publication dates to show the most lifetime loans, and indeed my most-loaned title The Great Pyramid Robbery (historical fiction, hooray!) was published back in 2001, while my second most popular title Spellfall (fantasy) was published in 2000. You might also expect books that have had several editions to show more loans than the others, and happily my award-winning debut book Song Quest (currently in its third edition at Catnip, after being first published in hardback by Element and then in paperback by Chicken House) comes in a clear third.

Books only published in the last couple of years will obviously not show many accumulated loans yet, but already the first title of my Pendragon series, Sword of Light (published in 2012 and chosen for the Summer Reading Challenge that year), has performed one of those fascinating crossovers on the graph and is now officially out-loaning the third title of my earlier Echorium Sequence Dark Quetzal (published in 2003).

In fact, if you look carefully at the graph, you'll see several places where my historical titles have overtaken my fantasy titles in the loan stakes, which makes me wonder why children's historical fiction is not easier to place with publishers. On the other hand, this is only a UK graph, and historical books are not popular everywhere. My Echorium Sequence titles (Song Quest, Crystal Mask, Dark Quetzal), which all have surprisingly flat curves on the graph, sold better than their loans suggest particularly in the US. My Seven Fabulous Wonders books on the other hand, even the one shooting off the graph, did not sell in America - or at least only as export copies - since they were not taken on by an American publisher, although they did get translated into several European languages where their historical settings are presumably more familiar with readers.

I find library loans quite interesting, because they are - or used to be - a fairly accurate reflection of print sales, and it's true The Great Pyramid Robbery and Spellfall were my top two selling titles in print. It also used to be that loan figures for a title were higher than the UK print sales, at least in my experience - but lately there's a different pattern emerging, with books selling as many or more copies in print as are being borrowed from libraries. Also, I've had my backlist selling as ebooks with online retailers for a couple of years now, and out of those books I am the Great Horse - although flattening off now on the loans graph - last year outsold the rest of my backlist put together. So perhaps ebooks are taking over where library loans flatten off?

I am the Great Horse - now an ebook

I'll admit the flat part of the curve occurring at a lower rate of loans for each successive book is rather worrying. Is this because of the recent library closures? Cuts to public funding? Or the frustratingly slow period in my career a few years ago? I'd have to compare my graph with other authors' PLR graphs to be sure if it is a trend... but Sword of Light (second curve on the right) looks to be reversing that for me, so perhaps there is some hope yet for my future as an author. Also, this graph shows data from UK public libraries only, and does not include loans from the many excellent school libraries around the country that I know keep copies of my books on their shelves so children can  borrow and read them if they want to. That's a good thought to end on.

Right, that's enough displacement activity! Just got time for a few fun figures to warm up before tackling my accounts...

The reason this graph lives in my finance file is because each one of those loans has earned me between 4p and 6.2p under the Public Lending Right scheme (the rate per loan varies each year). So, over the course of my career to date, working with an average of 5p per loan, my most popular book so far The Great Pyramid Robbery has earned me approximately £2,800 (or £200 per year), and all of my titles added together have earned me a total of  £11,880 (or about £840 per year). I'm always a little uneasy about PLR, since it comes out of people's taxes who might never read books... on the other hand, libraries are one of the public services we pay our taxes for, and there is a cap on payments to limit the burden on the public purse.

Historically, the PLR payment has not always existed for authors, but library loans clearly account for a large section of my readership, as they must do for many other authors. I'd be interested to hear readers' views on whether authors should be paid for these loans, especially if/when ebook lending takes over from print.

***

Katherine Roberts writes historical fiction and fantasy for young readers.

Her latest series the Pendragon Legacy about King Arthur's daughter is now available from Templar in hardcover, paperback or ebook. Meet the heroine Rhianna Pendragon and her friend Prince Elphin of Avalon in the free ebook prequel Horse of Mist.

More at www.katherineroberts.co.uk

Retro Summer Reading Challenge - Katherine Roberts

Hooray! It’s summer! School’s out, the sun is shining (at last), and the Summer Reading Challenge for children aged 4-11 is in full flow at libraries across the UK. This year’s Story Lab challenge has an Olympic theme, and children can sign up to read six books of their choice over the summer holidays.


inside our beautiful new library


There's a website with author videos, a whole list of recommended new titles, and other incentives to encourage young readers to read... wait for it... for fun.

Such grand schemes did not exist when I was a child. I never saw a real-life author, whether at a book festival, in school, or online… well, there wasn’t an online back then, and barely any festivals existed, though you’ll be pleased to hear we did have schools. I can only assume authors did not do so many visits in those days, or maybe my school didn't have the budget for them.

Fortunately, I needed no encouragement to complete my own personal reading challenge. My local library was my primary source of books, and I would read three (the maximum you could take out with a child’s library ticket) every weekend, and as many as I could get away with during the summer holidays. Before it transformed into the modern library shown above - complete with air conditioned meeting rooms, several floors of new low-level shelving, computers, indoor garden, café, and specially commissioned sculptures with a literary theme - my childhood library looked like this:


my childhood library today, awaiting demolition


It had a nice setting in a leafy corner of the local park, and in those days it was not boarded up or covered in graffiti, of course. But to me as a child, the library and its surroundings did not matter. I just remember the books I found there and the stories they contained, which whisked me away from the real world into one of adventure and magic.

So here, especially for the History Girls blog, is the...

*** Retro Summer Reading Challenge ***

Think back to when you were a child (i.e. before you transformed into a rebellious teenager and started reading the equivalent of "Fifty Shades of Grey" secretly under the bedcovers by torchlight). What books and authors did you enjoy?

When I was that age, my favourite author was Andre Norton. I devoured her Witch World books, of which there were many.

I did not know that she was American. I did not even know for sure that she was a “she", though for some reason I assumed this. I did not know she also wrote science fiction, fantasy and historical novels for adults under three pen names: Andre Norton, Andrew North and Allen Weston. I did not know that none of these three names were actually the name she had been born with - Alice Mary Norton - which she legally changed in 1934 to Andre Alice Norton to "increase her marketability”, because most science fiction/fantasy and historical adventure at that time was written by men and assumed to be read by boys. (Interestingly, this is a game many female authors still play today... haven’t we moved on from gender typing yet?!) I did not know she won the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1968, and published over 300 books between 1934 and 2005, when she died aged 93 still writing. To mark her wonderful career, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America created the Andre Norton Award for younger science fiction and fantasy literature.

Wow. If I had known all that stuff about my favourite childhood author, would it have made me want to read her books any more eagerly? I think not. Andre Norton was still very much alive at the time I was reading her Witch World books in the early 1970’s, which was brilliant for me because she already had a long backlist by then but was also still producing new books. I discovered her all on my own, because her books looked interesting on the library shelves, had exciting covers, and - more importantly - there were a lot of them, so I knew I would not run out of reading material. I didn’t particularly want to meet her, or watch a video of her, or see her talk at a festival. I had no idea how old she was and I didn't care. I just wanted her to hurry up and write the next book. Which, happily, she did.

Andre Norton was another author who effortlessly combined historical adventure with science/fiction fantasy, a connection I wrote about in my earlier Hunger Games post for this blog. If she had been in mid-career today, she might even have been a History Girl. Her first book "Ralestone Luck" (published as her second novel in 1938) was an adult historical adventure that begins with these inspiring words:
How hold ye Lorne?
By the oak leaf,
By the sea wave,
By the broadsword blade,
Thus we hold Lorne!
The oak leaf is dust,
The sea wave is gone,
The broadsword is rust,
How now hold ye Lorne?
By our Luck, thus we hold Lorne!

I’m delighted to discover Andre Norton’s "Witch World" novels are now being republished as ebooks to bring them to a whole new generation - one of the unexpected joys of modern technology. What goes around comes around, as they say.

So who was your favourite author (or favourite book) when you were a child? Let us know in the comments below, and we’ll create our very own Retro Summer Reading Challenge list!

***

Katherine Roberts www.katherineroberts.co.uk writes fantasy and historical adventure for children.

Sword of Light, the first book in her Pendragon Legacy quartet about King Arthur’s daughter, has been chosen for this year’s Summer Reading Challenge in UK libraries. See Katherine's message to young readers.