Editorial 87: July 1994
A Tale of Two Libraries
Officially, it was a two-day conference on Modern British Children’s Books for Russian librarians, translators and publishers to mark the arrival in Moscow of Julia Eccleshare’s exhibition, Children’s Books of the Year 1993. Julia herself was the main speaker with me in support. Since the British contingent also included David Sheldrake, Production Director of Egmont Publishers, and Helen Svojstokova, East European Sales Manager of Dorling Kindersley, and was organised at the British end – courtesy of Book Trust and the British Council – by Elizabeth Roberts, translator and writer on Russian affairs, it was obvious at the outset that our mission had a pretty wide remit.
That’s where the first of my libraries comes in. For the conference was initiated by the All Russia Library for Foreign Literature, an organisation of 600 professionals headed by Director General Ekaterina U Genieva who chaired every session personally – and that included a day beforehand setting the agenda and a day afterwards for de-briefing and careful follow-up planning. In Russia children’s books, particularly British children’s books, are treated completely seriously.
Of course, it’s our classics for older readers that predominate there. Young Russians are offered a heady, not to say heavy, brew of Dickens, Stevenson, Tolkien and Lewis consumed alongside their own literature which develops from a rich diet of indigenous folktales. What impressed me most about our discussions, though, was their openness. At present there’s no equivalent in Russia of what we’d call teenage fiction, for instance, or of fiction that deals directly with issues like homosexuality or AIDS. `Until recently teenagers with problems didn’t exist in Russia,’ commented one delegate, drily. `They weren’t allowed.’ This didn’t prevent huge interest, if expressed a little warily, in a glossy example of the sort of pulp-novel that’s routine in the UK, or a warmly appreciative response to an impromptu summary of Morris Gleitzman’s Two Weeks with the Queen. Whether we were exploring picture-books, reviewing journals or the pros and cons of literary prizes (and they all got a look in), the attitude throughout was positive and genuinely enquiring.
And who was hosting this whole event, remember?
Yes, a library.
That such a public institution should see itself at the cutting edge of cultural change, and the way in which this is best delivered, didn’t seem in the least bit odd at the time. It was only when we’d returned to Britain that I was struck by the irony. For here, private enterprise is assumed to make all the running for public initiatives not the other way round. According to the current orthodoxy, dynamism of the Genieva kind doesn’t exist in the state sector.
Perhaps that explains our Government’s apparent indifference to the effects of its policies on a service that, up till now, we’ve had every reason to place at the very centre of our support for reading. For I’d hardly arrived back home before I got a `phone call from Hampshire’s Deputy Chief Librarian. Would I be willing, he asked, to lend my influence as a critic and children’s author to the county’s campaign against the proposed re-organisation of local government and the devastating effect this would have on library provisions everywhere – in particular specialised provision for young people? Bring me up to date on the details, I said.
So he did. And a sorry picture emerged… of an estimated two-thirds loss in access to all the books, collections and other materials across the county; of a significant reduction in the range of books on offer as a result of reduced budgets; of a diminution in special services to business, to ethnic minorities, to the handicapped, the elderly and the infirm; of the doubts about the very survival of resources and advice for schools. All this is a side effect of an ideological preference for a series of small, unitary authorities (there would be seven of these in Hampshire) intended to replace the current two-tier county and district system.
I agreed, of course. I was duly photographed by the local press at my branch library here in Winchester with a stack of letters from library-users all over the county protesting at the proposed changes. Moscow suddenly seemed far, far away. Our message to Katya , Genieva and her team had been one of warm encouragement for their efforts to spearhead) new approaches to children’s reading in Russia. How sad that at home we seem bent on undermining the system that’s contributed so crucially to our own success.
Reorganisation … and libraries
The Local Government Commission will be mailing every household in the affected counties to sound out public opinion … do make sure you respond!
For information on the Library Association’s campaign to ensure that your library service doesn’t suffer from local government reorganisation, write to Donna MacLean at the Library Association, 7 Ridgmount Street, London WC1E 7AE.
