The bad news is that the British Library is the butt of controversy. And the good news? That the British Library is the butt of controversy. Who would have imagined that, while Culture ministers wring their hands in panic over how to make libraries more appealing to computer-crazed youngsters, the loudest complaint would be that the genteel calm of the British Library is being convulsed by too many young people turning up every day, triggering queues for entry, for cloakrooms and for books?

The new British Library has struggled to be loved. Over budget, and overdesigned, it is now cursed for being overused. It has become, critics say, a “groovy” magnet for students, who write essays and chat over cappuccinos. Could any news more greatly gladden the hearts of the paternalists who established the first public libraries 150 years ago as “universities of the people”, where the working classes could improve their minds?

On what ground should we deny access to books for some? “Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?” said Harold Pinter in The Homecoming - and what fitter place than in the British Library to mine the known and to illuminate the unknown? Where better to catch the contagion of learning than here, from other young readers? The British Library is the Plimsoll line below which other libraries should not sink - a haven of books rather than of youth-grabbing DVDs and internet coffee lounges. Cappuccinos are no threat to reading; just so long as the British Library remembers to stick to its brief of being a world-class library with “an ace caff” attached, rather than the other way around.