Article in the Guardian newspaper (UK) 9 February 2004.

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I yearn for Edna

Vast tracts of my waking life, calculation insists, have been passed in libraries. First there were those adolescent evenings spent in the branch library eyeing up the salacious jackets of old Dennis Wheatley novels. Next came school and university, fighting for the last copy of books with unappetising titles like Revolt and Reform: Europe in the Sixteenth Century. And then there was a whole catalogue of London establishments - little crannies tucked into backstreets.

Then, as now, a single factor seemed to unite these public amenities: the local council was always trying to slash their budgets, cut their opening hours and otherwise deter people from using them.

As a case-hardened library user, I keep a weary eye not only on the budgetary dispositions of local authorities (a polite form of words for "cuts"; by the way), but also on the pronouncements of librarians themselves. These, it must be said, have recently turned a great deal bolder in their scope. We all knew the library service was changing - one need only wander into the foyer of the average municipal library to establish that - but how much can perhaps be gauged from a letter written to the Times by John Dolan, the head of Birmingham libraries.

"We should stop seeing libraries as places of function - storing this, lending that, checking the other," he gamely deposed, "and more as places of free and shared exploration and learning via all media, a democratic space wherein to free your mind".

No disrespect to Mr Dolan, but I laughed out loud when I read that, as I did a day or so later when stumbling across an advert for a deputy head of library services placed by Staffordshire county council, and thoughtfully reproduced in Private Eye. "Sorry Edna" ran the letterpress, above a picture of a cardigan-wearing, bespectacled librarian. "Libraries aren't the sombre, silent places, you'd like them to be. Not in Staffordshire. Our libraries are welcoming places where the whole community can access vital information and life-affirming entertainment."

In each case the laughter was provoked not just by the uncanny resemblance to New Labour pronouncements on "culture" but by the hulking gap between the fine-sounding verbiage and the reality of the modern library service. Here in Norwich, for example, we have a wonderful new civic amenity called The Forum, built with lottery money after the old library burned down, with a pizza restaurant, shops and an ice-rink attached. Lots of "democratic space'; I suppose, if by that you mean rows of PCs tenanted by avid mobile telephonists, and huge stacks of 'life-affirming entertainment", if by that you mean multiple copies of mass-market videos and DVDs that are available for rental on any street corner. What the place lacks, in comparison with its predecessor, is any significant volume of books. The children's area, in particular, is full of computers and Rosie and Jim videos, but rather light on printed stock.

This is not a complaint about libraries having to resort to video and CD rentals make ends meet. Revenues have to be raised, the argument runs, and anything that lures punters through the doors is to be encouraged on the grounds that it might just inspire them to wander up the stairs to the literature section. Neither is it a complaint about venues such as the Norwich Forum, which is always full of people, even if those people are not always behaving in a manner of which us old-style library users approve (it's a sign of the times, no doubt, that the posters instruct you to talk quietly into your mobile rather than switch it off).

At the same time, the old- fashioned public library used to be something more than this, and offer something at once more prosaic and more necessary than these 21st- century rumpus rooms. Above all, they used to be places where ordinary people, whether students or otherwise, could come and pursue their studies in conditions they could not find anywhere else.

The old Norwich central library, before it perished in an electrical firestorm, sombre and silent it might have been, contained a vast reference section complete with dozens of study tables where, instead of netsurfing with your mates, you could simply get on with your homework, tyrannised over by "Edna", who, whatever her faults, could at least enforce that optimum working condition of communal-hush.

I was a middle-class boy with a bedroom of my own and a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica, but some of my schoolfriends weren't so fortunate. Where do they go now? Naturally I'm all for democratic spaces and life affirming entertainment. You might think, though, that one of the greatest benefits our free library service could offer would be space, books and the silence in which to read them.

D J Taylor is a novelist and critic