[Publib] Larry McMurty on Books

[Pat McMahon]

 Dear Colleagues,

Many of you will probably have seen this, but for those of you that have not, I think it is a very important statement, and I hope you will not mind me using the quotation here. It is from Larry McMurty's   Books: A Memoir which has just been published. I found the quotation in the New York Review (current issue) where the book is reviewed by Michael Dirda.


"Today the sight that discourages book people most is to walk into a public library and see computers where books used to be. In many cases not even the librarians want books to be there. What consumers want now is information, and information increasingly comes from computers.

That is a preference I can't grasp, much less share, though I'm well aware that computers have many valid uses. They save lives, and they make research in most cases a thing that's almost instantaneous.

They do many good things.

But they don't really do what books do, and why should they usurp the chief function of a public library, which is to provide readers access to books?

Books can accommodate the proximity of computers but it doesn't seem to work the other way around. Computers now literally drive out books from the place that should, by definition, be books' own home: the library."  (end of quotation).

Further good points in relation to librarianship are made in the final third paragraph where Dirda quotes Cyril Connolly stating that "book collecting is a kind of prayer." Surely, the putting together of a book collection in a public library is also a kind of prayer, something sacred.

Every good wish,

Pat McMahon,
County Librarian,
Galway,
Ireland.


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