I FELL IN LOVE with libraries at the age of . . . I can’t remember. I was too young. The first library I remember borrowing books from was on board ship when I was a very young child, and I thought what an extraordinary present to be given, this use of all these books that I could borrow and read and take back and swap for another one.

There were libraries in my early schools, too, I seem to remember (I went to school in Australia, and Norfolk, and London, and Norfolk again, and Zimbabwe before I was 11); but the first one that made a big impression was the public library in Battersea, where we lived briefly when I was 10.

That was where I first read about the Moomins, and about the French children in that exciting novel A Hundred Million Francs, by Paul Berna, and, come to that, about Biggles. Ever since the day when my mother took me there and got me signed in as a member, joining the local public library has been almost the first thing I’ve done on moving to a new address.

Now that I live in Oxford, where there are some of the greatest libraries in the world, I feel very privileged. But it isn’t only the Bodleian, or the Science Library, or the Law Library, these great university institutions, that I cherish. Only a week ago I spent some time in the Oxford public library’s local history department, looking through old maps of the city for a scene in a novel I’m writing now. Everything I needed was there, and the staff were helpful and knowledgeable, and I came away, as I always do, grateful for the wise provision of an earlier generation, for a time in our history when civic leaders thought that education and knowledge were not a luxury for the idle rich, but a vital necessity if every citizen was going to live a full and decent life.

But why are libraries necessary in this age of the internet and Google? Isn’t every scrap of information we could ever want soon going to be available online?

Well, all the things that the internet can’t provide are part of the essential experience of going to a library. First, there’s the place itself: a special place, dedicated to assembling knowledge and making it available. There’s a seriousness about library buildings and the atmosphere they contain — not a solemn hush-hush disapproval, but a feeling that people come here to go about the business of thinking about important things, of finding out truths, of extending their knowledge. Secondly, there’s the physical engagement with the books. Looking at a screen, reading text on a monitor, is a process I and many people find a bit cold and distancing, and certainly uncomfortable to do for a long time.

Everything is the same size, at the same angle from your body, lit by the same light, and perhaps in the end all equally uninteresting. But a book engages more of your senses and much more vividly. If it’s an old book, so much the better; you know that many hands have turned these very pages, many years ago. A book is infinitely more comfortable and pleasant and informative than a screen. The very impress of the print on the paper is a valuable part of your experience of the book.

Libraries give us this physical engagement in a way that no Google ever will.

Thirdly, there’s the infinite value of browsing. You simply don’t know what you’ll find till you’re in front of a range of shelves full of books. Of course they say you can browse on the internet, but it isn’t really browsing; some system or algorithm has done the selecting for you. Much, much better to stand in front of a shelf of books and simply pick them up and look for yourself. You never know what you’ll find — and that’s exactly the point.

Fourthly, there’s the library staff. What helpfulness, what experience, what knowledge! Compared with a face-to-face conversation with a real live intelligent informed human being who knows the sort of thing you’re looking for and can suggest more ways than one of getting to it, the internet is like an automated answering service: ignorant, mechanical, inhuman, stupid, graceless and hugely frustrating. Long live librarians.

So libraries of every sort are treasure houses. I love them, I cherish them, I use them all the time, I could not bear to live in a society without them.

I hope the Love Libraries campaign will spread this love even further, and make libraries safe against every kind of danger. Because there are people who hate libraries; who think that public knowledge, publicly available, is a threat to the State, or to the private benefit of mighty corporations; who resent democracy and the free exchange of opinions and the free availability of information; who would like to privatise every public good, and destroy everything that doesn’t make a profit. I’m on the side of everyone who uses libraries, from the little child looking through the picture books, to the scholar searching for hard-to-find knowledge, to the busy man or woman looking for something entertaining to read on the train, to the poor old vagrant who’s just come in to sit near the radiator on a winter’s day. The library is for all of us. Let’s look after it!

Philip Pullman is the author of the trilogy His Dark Materials. The Love Libraries campaign was launched this week

© Philip Pullman 2006

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