The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - A Topic That May Surprise You -- But It's Worth It!

Episode Date: November 11, 2021

When's the last time you were in a library? If it's been a while you may not know what you're missing until you listen to this.  Two professors from St. Andrew's University in Scotland with a new book just out this week on why we should care about libraries and how they are changing, and not changing, just us for us.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. Today, a special, wait for it, on libraries. We'll tell you why in a moment. Our podcast is brought to you by Questrade, Canada's fastest-growing and award-winning online broker. Tired of getting dinged with fees every time you buy or sell U.S. stocks? Well, good news. With Questrade, you don't have to. You can hold U.S. dollars in your trading account and avoid expensive, forced conversion fees every time you trade U.S. stocks. Switch today and get up to $50 worth of free trades. Visit Questrade.com to open an account and use promo code QUEST.

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Your man, Spooge here once again. Now, do you remember the first time you ever went in a library? I think I do. Now, it may not have been the actual very first time I went in a library, because that was probably in my very early years, and I actually don't remember. When I went to school in Kuala Lumpur in Malaya, when I was like three or four years old,

my mother was my teacher. I'm sure there was a library in that school of some kind, so I probably went in that one. But the first time I actually remember going in a library, I was a little older than that. And it was in Ottawa after we'd moved to Ottawa. And I'm not talking about school libraries anymore. I'm talking about the public library. And the public library, when I was going to school in Ottawa,

in our area, was on Bank Street, just across the canal from Lansdowne Park, where the Ottawa Rough Riders played in those days, back in the 1950s, late 50s. And you'd walk to the library, and I was kind of prodded and pushed by my parents, you know, if you want to learn more, you've got to understand more, you've got to go to the library. And so I used to go, and you'd take out books, and you'd fill out the little cards,

and you'd promise to have it back within X number of days or there'd be a penalty, and away you'd go. So I would do that every once in a penalty, and away you go. So I would do that every once in a while, but I can remember, you know, the hushed silence in the library, in the librarian who was, you know, very strict about keeping that hushed silence. A library was a place to respect and to read if you wished, but you needed to do it with quiet.

So he or she, whoever the librarian was, would ensure that in fact that respect was kept. So it was a special place. But that was, you know, 60 years ago. Life has changed. The way we gather information has changed. The way we read has changed. But libraries still exist.

There may be moments of struggle, but they're still out there. And I wanted to do this, not that I'm, you know, in any way particular about libraries. I can't remember the last time I went to a library. I think it was the University of Toronto in the Robarts building. I had a tour of that because some of my papers are there in the archives at the University of Toronto. And so I had a wonderful tour of their various sections in that university library, including a rare books section. Anyway, my interest was piqued in my recent visit to Scotland by a new book that came out just this week in North America.

It's been out for a few weeks in the United Kingdom. But just this week in North America, it's getting, you know, significant reviews in the United Kingdom. But just this week in North America, it's getting significant reviews in the United States. It's called The Library of Fragile History. And it's written by two professors at St. Andrews University in Scotland. Now, I had a couple of letters last week at the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com from people who heard me say, oh, I'm doing a show from St. Andrews,

and they assumed it was all about golf, right? Oh, you got to go to this hole or that hole, or you got to go to this, you know, the ladies' putting club. You got to do this, you got to do that, you got to tell these stories got to go to this, you know, the ladies putting club. You got to do this. You got to do that. You got to tell these stories. I said, no, no, no.

You know, as much as I'm partial to golf, this is not a book about a story about golf. This is a story about libraries. So the library of fragile history is written by Andrew Pettigree and Arthur de Weydeven, both of whom teach at St. Andrews. And St. Andrews University is famous for a lot of different reasons. It's one of Scotland's top universities. It's where Will and Kate, I think, met when they were both going to university there. And, of course, there are brilliant studies on any number of different subjects that come out of St. Andrews.

But this one piqued my interest. I thought, okay, I want to know more. And so I reached out to these two fellows, Professors Pedigree and Der Veda Vain, and they were both, hey, no problem. We'd love to talk. You know authors. They can't get enough publicity for their books.

Off the record, still on the bestseller list. So I reached out, they agreed, and when we come back, my interview with the two St. Andrews professors about why we should care about libraries and what is the current state of libraries on a kind of worldwide basis. So we'll begin that right after this. Our Black Product Sponsor is The Economist.

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This is The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge. All right, back with the authors of the new book receiving attention in different parts of the world and just released in North America this week, The Library, A Fragile History by Andrew Pettigree and Arthur Dervedeven from St. Andrews University in Scotland. So enough with the preamble. Let's hear the interview. You know, I want to start by talking a little bit about this wonderful library in Inner Peffray, which is, I don't know, to describe it to Canadians, I guess it's not far from Perth, not far from Stirling, if you're looking at a map of Scotland. But it has a lot of history to it. And Arthur, I want you, as somebody who's walked in that library, to try and give us a sense of what you found when you were in there

and what we'd find if we were there. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, it's it's truly one of our uh favorite libraries um certainly uh certainly in the uk possibly even in the world um like you describe it it's it's in quite a rural setting uh in rural perthshire and um it's this wonderful um wonderful two-story building uh next to an old chapel and this was a a building that was um uh that used to belong to Lord David Drummond, who in 1680, at the end of the 17th century, decided to bequeath his library, his collection of books that he had built up over his lifetime, to the people of the area, to the people of the village of Innerpeffry and the nearby town of Creve. And he brought together a library of about 3,000 books that he equipped this building for. And he ensured that the top floor is where all the books are kept, these wonderful wall-lined bookcases, floor to ceiling, with a couple of sort of bays in the middle. And downstairs was an apartment for the librarian, for the person who would be taking care of these books. And if you still go there today, and there's an absolutely wonderful librarian, everyone,

anyone is welcome to come, and they get this tour of this excellent collection. And, you know, you're allowed to grab some books from the shelf, whatever you fancy, and whether that's a, you know, a 16th century English Bible or a multi-volume 17th century atlas that's been hand-colored. And, you know, you're going through these pages, and it's history right in front of you. And it's just one of the most magical experiences you can have as a scholar, knowing especially that this library served for such a long time

an area of Scotland that was relatively poorly serviced by libraries. This was a place that people from the entire surrounding areas would come flock to to visit. And we know this especially because, and this is quite special for this library. There is a surviving 18th century reader's register, a borrower's register, where you can see which local people borrowed books and what they borrowed and what they read. And we really got an insight to see that the people of rural Persia love their religion and they love their history. And those were the subjects they would go to for interpephary.

Are those two of the key reasons, Andrew, that you would say that libraries began to thrive and be successful in those earliest days? Religion and history. Is that what people were going for? Well, I wouldn't say that libraries were thriving in those days. I mean, what marks Inner Peffrey out is the fact that, as Arthur has quite rightly said, he has these wonderful ledgers, so people have been able to study the history of reading, and that's what makes it so vanishingly unusual, but also that it survives. Because throughout the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, people were struggling with how to create a library for community use. And a lot of people gave their books to the local town. People sometimes, particularly ministers, gave their own books to the parish church.

But virtually none of these libraries survive. In fact, on Saturday, we're going to one of the rare survivors in Malden and in Essex, where the donor, Tom's Plume, was wise enough to create the building which the library should have. But most of these libraries were very swiftly lost because curating them became more than a burden than a joy. And throughout the history of trying to create a public library, which really didn't succeed until Andrew Carnegie came along at the end of the 19th century, the library struggles from two things. One is competitors, subscription libraries, circulating libraries, other more commercial forms of library, and secondly, the desire of librarians to improve the taste of users. In other words, not give them the books they necessarily wanted, but the books which are good for them. And that has been the besetting problem of public libraries really right up to the 1970s. I want to touch on, you mentioned Carnegie.

And I want to mention him because, you know, he had an impact around the world. I mean, when I'm in Canada, the community I live in is called Stratford, Ontario. It's not far from Toronto, a couple of hours drive. It's only about 30,000, 33,000 people, but it's one of the 2,000 communities in the world, roughly 2,000, that Carnegie, the richest man in the world at the time, decided to donate much of his fortune to funding libraries, building libraries in some cases,

in different parts of the world. So I want to get, because you both describe very well this kind of boom and bust, mostly bust in the library world over the last number of hundreds of years. What impact Carnegie had on trying to ensure that libraries could survive? Arthur, why don't you... Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Andrew. Well, Carnegie succeeded largely because he brought the same tough-mindedness to libraries

that he brought to his business dealings. He'd lived in a world where he could see libraries being founded and then basically libraries lasting a generation and then the concerns of the next generation not being the same as the generation of builders. So he got around this problem by donating the money to build a building, but only on condition that the community promised in perpetuity to provide a sum equivalent of a tenth of the cost of construction to its upkeep. And he also urged upon them an architectural model which was austere and practical for small communities particularly and I'm sure Peter you've seen some of these beautiful small buildings and no Doric columns no balustrades none of the features which showed the donor as a great man in the community, which had been the model up to this point.

Do you want to add to that, Arthur? Yeah, absolutely. And I think what was, you know, why was Carnegie so successful? He recognizes that for libraries to thrive, they do actually need to be used. And history has been filled throughout with libraries as symbols of knowledge or symbols of power. Indeed, this idea of, you know, the great man of the community. But, you know, as soon as that memory fades, people don't concern themselves anymore with that particular building or that collection because the connection they've had to that symbol has been lost. So what Carnegie showed is to say, look, I can give you the funds for these libraries, but you need to decide what

books you want. What use are you as a community going to make with this collection? And I think that really set people thinking about the way they want to organize their libraries. And if we look at the, on this point of architecture that Andrew raises, one of the really interesting contrasts you have there is the 18th century Baroque revitalization of great church and monastic libraries in Europe, especially in Germany and in Austria, where if you were to buy today a book described as, you know, the 100 most beautiful libraries in the world, half of them would be filled with these beautiful monastic temples, St. Gallen, for example, in Switzerland, or Admont

in Austria, where really these are libraries designed to be overwhelming, to be mesmerizing. But there's no place to read books. And I think that is what Carnegie got, you know, that a library is there for a practical use and also to actually consult his books, to enjoy them. And that's what ensured his success. I want to spend a few minutes talking about where we are today with libraries generally, and that's what, in some ways, your book is all about.

And so I want to get a snapshot before i ask some specific questions about today's library world and the the general question is are you know it sounds it sounds like most of the time over the hundreds of years of histories of library it has not been thriving it has been you know just trying to stay alive where do you point to today where are libraries today are they just surviving are they thriving or is it you know less than surviving arthur well i if i'm if i may stop a piece of sounds of this one um i would would say libraries are thriving. This is especially, I mean, if I just give you some bare statistics, there's still, I think, 2.6 million libraries around the world, including 400,000 public libraries. And then we haven't even considered

one of the most important form of library that we talk about in our story, and that is personal collections and private collections. And there's never been more opportunity than today for people to amass collections of books. And we find them everywhere these days. It's school libraries, university libraries are bigger and better than ever. We see the amount of libraries you will find on the street, in old post boxes that people will be using for their community where people can access books. I would say in that general picture, there are more libraries than ever. But the key distinction is that we need to recognise that at the same time, the fate of most libraries and indeed of these personal

collections is that they will be dispersed they will not last forever and i think we have as a society a fixation on this idea that libraries should be there for perpetuity that they represent something of of human knowledge that they should always remain whereas we we see a world where libraries thrive, but they do also, they disperse and are reconstructed again by different people, all depending on their needs, on their tastes in books. And that is something that as a society we have to recognize. Andrew, you're co-authors of this book with Arthur, but does that mean you agree on key points like that one? Yes. I think our whole purpose in this book is to demonstrate that the so-called crisis of the library is not a crisis of the present, but a normal process of construction, of gathering, of dissolution and dispersal and reconstruction. We were asked by a leading Scottish paper to take part in their campaign to save the public library in Scotland. So I think that there is a crisis, but it's a very specific crisis, and it's a crisis of the branch library in the UK.

In many parts of the UK, the town's central library has been extremely sensitively redesigned and reconstructed to meet the modern needs of its users. There's more noise. There's more coffee shops. there's more association space. And it's interesting that when we've talked to people who are campaigning to keep these branch libraries open, they often refer to these ancillary features, a place for people to use computers, to come and gather for meetings for various groups of the community. And they've seldom mentioned books. And the truth is these branch libraries are increasingly ill served for people who want to read books, because the people who are in these smaller communities

want the same range of books available to them that they would get if they were going to the main library. And so that's the difficulty that branches are facing in a position where, certainly in the UK, funds are very tight, and the people who campaign for keeping these branches open seldom suggest what other services should be sacrificed in order to maintain the branch library network. flourishing library culture based around a complete redesign of their municipal libraries, which were moribund up until the 1970s, as city media texts with all sorts of community interests served, but also superb collections of books. So it can be done. It's just a case of social priorities. Okay, here's a question about today. And let me frame it this way, and maybe Arthur, you can take a run at this one. We've been confronted in this country, that much of the

popular literature in schools and textbooks and movies, that the history we've been learning has come from one perspective, more or less, and that most notably, Black and Indigenous versions of history have been underrepresented. When it comes to libraries, where quite literally, they hold history in them, they hold knowledge in them, how have they evolved or have they evolved to include more than one main perspective of history especially when so many other diverse groups are much more oral based than text how do libraries make sure they're living up to their promise of knowledge and information for all people now i know there's a lot in there. It's kind of a loaded question.

And different libraries operate differently, I'm sure. But in general, is that an issue for libraries too, that they are evolving or are they not? Well, it's a very good question. And I would say the key thing to recognize here is indeed this promise you speak of, you know, that libraries are there for everyone and that they should offer diverse literature, literature of various genres and sorts, not only instructive or educational, but also recreational. in the history of libraries. And throughout history, libraries have often contained one sort of book, often from one perspective of political allegiance or indeed a confessional allegiance. And books that belong to a different creed were often not,

you know, they weren't included in those libraries. Sometimes they were, but there's one particularly hilarious case of the Swedish Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries. Sweden, Lutheran Protestant country, but also a great empire that when it was rampaging through Germany and Poland, whenever they encountered a Catholic town, they would seize its entire library and transport all the Catholic books back to Sweden, not because they wanted the population of Sweden to be reading Catholic books, but because these were books that Swedish ministers

would want to be reading so they could defend Protestantism. And indeed, in the great university library at Uppsala, they kept all these books, but they kept them on a separate floor of the library that was only accessible through a special door, the key to which was in the hands of the librarian only. So there is this sense to which that libraries, depending on what society has deemed to be their purpose, they have collected books specifically for that need. And so this idea that libraries should have books for everyone and should tell the history of everyone, and indeed also, as you say, of cultures that have,

up until more modern times, have an oral literate culture rather than a textual written culture. That is a very new development. And from what we can see, libraries are certainly embracing that and are often indeed at the forefront of this development rather than at the rear. Andrew, I know you wanted to say something on that point. Go ahead, and then I've got another question for you.

Yeah, I mean, I would endorse that. And I think Arthur putting it in a historical perspective also helps guard one of the great dangers of these debates today. And that's what I would describe as the arrogance of the present. The sense that we have got a unique perspective on how society should be run, and that somehow we have reached a perfection now against which we should all judge all of history. And obviously, in 50 years time, people look back at us and say, wow, they really didn't get it at all. The other point I would make is that librarians are extremely sensitive to these issues because in Britain, at least, libraries are a local responsibility rather than a national responsibility. So they're ideally placed to be responsive to the needs of their particular community, which varies very much, depending on whether you're in Dingwall, or central Birmingham. And I think that's also

got to be remembered, that the librarians in central Birmingham have been dealing with these issues now for 50 years, long before they became hot button issues in national politics. I love your term, the arrogance of the present. I've got to imagine that you have some really interesting debates with some of your younger students in your classes when you try that line out on them uh so good luck with that and uh we'll see we'll see how that works out for you um we're we're gobbling up time uh quite quickly and and so i want to do do what we call over here on the other side of the pond, we call it, you know, short snappers. So I'll give you a question,

and if we can try and do the condensed version of the answer. Arthur, what's digitizing doing to libraries? Digitizing is making many, many more books available to a broader section of the population. It's also ensuring that there's fewer printed books often in libraries. And to a certain extent, there is a real competition between the two, which Andrew and I haven't taken the long perspective of history view, again, as a little bit of a danger, because digitization doesn't mean we should get rid of printed books. Andrew, will there always be a need for bricks-and-mortar libraries, or will they become more like Amazon,

where you can get what you want through the internet there will always be um a case for bricks and mortar libraries uh not um leased because a library as a physical um building is where you go to be surprised just like you do in a bookshop. And bookshops and libraries have more in common than people realize and, indeed, have often worked very closely together. I often go into a library or into a bookshop and come across a book I've never heard of and never imagined existed. And this browsing is one of the features, I think,

that the digital revolution has really struggled and thus far failed to recreate. So even if, and there's a great danger, as we've discovered during the pandemic, that if society just becomes atomized into people remaining forever in their homes and servicing all their needs digitally then that's an impoverishment of society and libraries can play against that you agree with that arthur absolutely uh what 100 percent um i mean i think where we we think very much uh um along along along the same lines there. And again, we've been informed by the fact that previously there were new technologies that came along too,

like microfilm or microfiche that some libraries embraced as this sort of whole scale replacement for all the technologies that have been around for a long time. I mean, we've had the code uh for pretty much two millennia now and it's still going strong so i say why replace it yeah let me assure you peter let me let me assure you peter that um our book uh 90 of the copies that sell will be print right, I know that feeling. I'm a struggling author myself these days. And my fame, if you want, in Canada is based on my voice because I was a journalist of some repute in the country for about 50 years. And my voice is very well recognized. So the assumption on the publisher would be, we'll be able to sell a lot of books as audio books if you do that.

So, you know, I, I agreed to, you know, do an audio copy, but it's, it is totally blown away by the print copies of the books, you know? So it's interesting because I think when they started doing audio books, the assumption was, and I'm not knocking audio books. A lot of people depend on them, especially when they're driving in their car, etc. But I think a lot of people assumed, because of the age we're living in, that they were going to mean the end eventually of the print copy of a book and home libraries.

That hasn't happened. There's nothing like the feel of a book, right? Yeah. Betting on the future in the technology of information is a great way to lose money. That must be another good one for an argument in your class. I'll throw this one at Andrew as well, because you brought this issue up of being surprised, the pleasure of being surprised in the library by finding something you hadn't thought of. Give me some other surprise. What would we find surprising

about libraries that we haven't discussed here today or we generally don't think about? What would be something surprising about libraries? Well, I'm going to hand over to Arthur because he's got a good idea. But I'll just say before I do, one thing that was really striking when we went around libraries to discuss with librarians their world is the disconnect between the ambitions of the senior management who always want a new building, who always want to impress the mayor, who always want to leave a legacy and the solid commitment of the branch librarians who actually see the local people who come in and know that they're actually quite conservative in their choices,

but that the books they give them mean an awful lot in their life. And that's going to be a continuing tension in the library movement. Arthur? Yeah, I'm going to lower the tone here slightly, perhaps, after that wonderful comment, Andrew. But one thing that really surprised us, you know, when we were speaking to library staff of the present day, one of the things that always came up is how librarians viewed their libraries as

a place where people could find a temporary refuge. They could come there, they can do their taxes, they can use the internet. Most of all, often it's just about warming up, which of course I can imagine. I haven't been to many Canadian libraries, but I imagine that's the case in Canada too. But actually, for most of the history of libraries, libraries have been terribly cold places, precisely from the fact that fire and heating are pretty dodgy things to have around the library.

And indeed, we know of several scholars in the 17th century who most likely died as a result of the pneumonia. They developed while working in the Botleyan Library in Oxford, which had one of the strictest policies against kindling a flame, as readers who will register at the Botleyan Library today still have to vow as they get their reader's card. Now, it's not a library, but it is a famous bookstore, and I'm sure that you've both been in it at one time or another, and that's Leakey's in Inverness, which is a wonderful bookstore, you know, tiered up on a number of floors.

But it, too, is freezing cold, although they have this huge, you know, almost open fire pit in the middle of Leakey's to try and give some more. So when you find a book, you find people down there just kind of huddled around the furnace trying to stay warm. Let me close where we started, and that's on interpephary. I was surprised when you outlined it, Arthur, that there are still some books there from the original library. Not only that, you can go up and take it off the shelf and read it.

Can you take it off the shelf and take it home? Not anymore, sadly. It did used to be the case at Inner Peffrey, which again was another reason for its success. Because this is another thing which we consider to be totally common, that you go to a library and you're able to borrow some books and take them home, read at your pleasure. But actually, sort of free borrowing rights are a relatively modern development in library history. So the fact that you can't do it anymore within a peffery,

I certainly can understand. They have some very, very valuable books, incredibly rare items. And indeed, books you will not find in any other library. So it's a really, really special place. I would urge all your listeners, if they get the chance to go to Scotland, certainly stop by in a PEPFRI. Right. Arthur, Andrew, this has been a treat, a real pleasure to talk to both of you.

Wish you the best of luck on your book. And I know it will be of interest to many Canadians, and that's why there's a North American edition of it coming out in a very short time. So thank you both very much. Well, there you go. Two wonderful professors from St. Andrews University in Scotland, Andrew

Pettigree and Arthur Dervedeven. Their book, once again, The Library of Fragile History, and it's out now in North America, just in the last 24 hours. So you can grab your copy wherever you get books. You may have to order it with them, or it may be there on the shelf. So if you're interested, and you've got to admit, when you first heard that I was going to do a show just on libraries, you probably went, really?

Libraries for a whole show? Now, I know some of you are fascinated by that topic and had no problem listening to a whole show, but others perhaps had to get interested, and those two guys tell an interesting story about a part of our lives

that we're lucky to have and would be very unlucky to lose. Anyway, enough on that. Tomorrow, Good Talk, Chantelle Hebert, Montreal, Bruce Anderson in Ottawa. Looking forward to see what they have to say on any number of different topics. In the meantime, I'm Peter Mansbridge. This has been The Bridge.

Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you again in 24 hours.