So much to do, so little time at the moment!
However, there is so much library woe in the country that I wanted to highlight the Save Libraries day of action on Saturday. If you use your library, or have used your library, or want libraries to be around in the future or think libraries are good things, have a look at www.voicesforthelibrary.org.uk and see what’s happening where you live and what you can do about it.
Tags: libraries
This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wetTill day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.Ted Hughes – Wind
This is what was going through my mind in the middle of last night as the window did tremble to come in! As well as being topical, this fits with what I’ve been thinking recently about how people choose books and the importance of design.
I first read ‘Wind’ in my school copy of ‘The Dragon Book of Verse‘, a section of which we studied for GCSE English Literature. (It wasn’t in the section we were studying, in case you’re interested, that was the Childhood section!) The exam we had was open book and that is where ‘The Dragon Book’ came into its own. Not for any great note-writing space or wondrous introduction but simply because it had such a confidence inspiring cover!
If you follow the link (to Amazon) you might see what I mean. In reality the cover is even better, the design is raised and shiny and the spine is a rainbow spectrum with black text. Just to have it in my hand as I walked into the exam room made me feel more confident and reassured.
When we’re talking about how people choose their books in the library (usually in a reader development context) much is made of the importance of face-on display. Opening the Book is (dare I say) a little obsessed with front-facing display stands and devices to make even your normal library shelves into display stands that show off the design of the front cover of a book. It does work. Make a face on display and that book which has had one issue in the past 2 years will go out, thin books which are lost on the library shelves will become objects of curiosity (I once made a display of books under 200 pages long which went amazingly well), people will discover new authors and try new genres. Gone are the days when each book was lovingly bound in leather for protection giving bookshelves of uniform appeal. Now, the colour, the font, the image used all give an indication of the contents even on the spine. Let’s face it, a lot of the publisher’s money and time and has gone into the cover design and the cover design sells.
However, libraries are not bookshops, to pile their best-sellers face-on with a seemingly limitless supply of stock. To libraries, individual titles are of equal value, not as a commodity whose worth lies in the number of copies sold, but as individual items whose worth lies in value to a reader. This is not to say libraries won’t have the latest best-sellers, in multiple copies. We will. But we will also have the new, the old, the obscure; the book you always wanted or the book you never knew you needed. This makes displaying the cover of a book even more important. You know what the bestsellers look like, you can pick them out of any line-up, but most of us need a little help to pick the book we haven’t met yet.
I know that everyone is not be so passionate about the importance of design as I am. I am a unique product of my father’s education. He was a printer by trade and I spent hours of my childhood being shown how to space letters properly by hand, how to design and typeset effectively and having examples of bad design pointed out to me no matter where we were (a trait which I find that I now possess myself, how you become your parents!). He taught me the value of good design and that is why I bought myself a copy of ‘The Dragon Book of Verse’ with the rainbow cover a few years after I left school. So that if the wind blows hard, or I find a small dragon or need to know the order parts are named, I can find it and be reassured.
