more than books

on the tangibility of libraries and stories after one year of lending

The Nature Library has now been open as a lending library in Irvine for one year, unearthing all clichés you’d expect. Time is flying! It feels both as though it’s been here barely a month, and simultaneously I can’t believe that a year ago, the people who’ve come through its doors were strangers.

I don’t know what the next year will look like, or what’s the best way to share these books and celebrate libraries, not only this niche one (niche? is “nature” niche?) but also, especially, public libraries and books and storytelling and communal knowledge. It’s hard to determine whether or not, or to what extent, a library or a book is doing anything, which in a way is the eternal struggle for those working in and using these spaces, but all I keep thinking is, put simply, “read, read, read”. For every library closed or defunded, for every world leader — global caretakers, what if they were called caretakers? — lacking in empathy or imagination, for every book banned, read harder.

Some news before a look back at the library’s first twelve months:

— The Nature Library will be closed on May 25 and June 1 , returning on June 8. I’m off on holiday for some hard reading.

— Absolutely thrilled to share a new collaboration between The Nature Library and St Andrews Botanic Garden. It’s Only the End of the World is a book group where we’ll unearth narratives that encourage us to question, reflect, and reimagine the futures yet to come, asking what it means to live through moments of profound change and how literature can equip us to witness and engage with these shifts. Led by Anne Daffertshofer, the first meeting is on May 21 on the art of attention, and I’ll join her on June 19 for a book group discussing Ursula K Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest. Full details and booking here.

— Another collaboration, this time with Story Wagon, brings together a collection of books about Scotland’s rainforests for a series of events beginning this week.

— Mark your calendars for June 8 when The Nature Library will be celebrating World Ocean Day at Irvine harbourside, details to come.

— The library continues its pop ups and workshops across Scotland. If you’re interested in working together, get in touch at thenaurelib@gmail.com.

---

A version of this piece was originally published on Caught by the River’s Shadows and Reflections series.

It’s often said, rightly so, that libraries are more than books. Usually this is to highlight the additional services offered by the modern library, such as ‘unofficial creches, homeless shelters, language schools and asylum support’ to the communities they serve. But even when all a library does offer is books, just books, it’s more than that. From the moment the first person walks in, the first conversation or the first turning of the page, their potential is limitless. This is not new information.

When I started The Nature Library it was because I had a collection of books about the natural world I wanted to share, given that each of which had contributed to and enhanced my experience of this world. By putting them in one place they formed, by nature, a library. A library by definition. A single word (I wrote ‘a single world’ by accident). For the past five years it’s been popping up across Scotland, from Moniaive to Ullapool to Ayr to Dunbar and my goal — a loose one, with no route plan or time frame given that I’m a librarian by happenstance as opposed to by temperament or training — has always been to one day find a permanent space for it. For the library to become a “proper library”. Proper in the sense that a visitor is able to choose a book, take it home, and when they come back a few weeks later to return it, the library will still be there.

Following a series of fortunate events and serendipitous meetings, in spring the library took up residence in one of the Scottish Maritime Museum’s old shipyard worker’s flats at Irvine harbourside, just up from my gran’s old house and just down from where I’d buy two Gregg’s sausage rolls for 80p on my lunch break and enjoy them out the back of the mall, brushing buttery flakes and cigarette ash from my black polyester trousers. The public library of my childhood, since moved, sat somewhere between these two landmarks.

The Nature Library has been rooting itself as a “proper library” in this postage stamp square of Ayrshire for a year now, so it’s unsurprising that these past twelve months have had me thinking a lot more about libraries in general. My understanding of them, the forms they take and the communities they shape, their malleability and their magic and their value. What is surprising is that I’ve thought about the books less. Sort of. In a way. Of course, the books are there. They hold the library together. They’re beautiful and enriching and they smell good and one of them might change your life. But when I look back on this year I don’t necessarily see the books, I see people. It stuns me to think that they were unknown to me before May of last year. Artists, activists, gardeners, horticulturists, filmmakers, poets, vets, chefs, students, politicians, arts workers, conservation workers, volunteers, geologists, bookbinders. Readers. Bringing knowledge, humour, kindness and company every time they buzz that door. I find myself thinking that this isn’t a fair exchange and recall a statistic: ‘for every £1 invested in a library, the community gains £7 in social capital’. There’s one visitor who, every time we say goodbye, leaves me frantically typing in my Notes app the things he’s said or told me to look up. These include but are not limited to (unedited): joseph boyce dance cage, west kilbride glen, mkilwinning abbey records disappeared, im in a forest the shape of a ship, anthony gormley, edgar allan poe was in irvine, irv new town artists, behind dundonald castle, female photographer hitlers bath, send link to sue mushroom sounds.

One day, a family of five comes in. They disperse between the two rooms and the youngest, barely beyond toddling, butter-blonde curls and eyes like blue moons, runs back and forth like she’s trying to win a prize for it. She picks something off the shelf and shoots full pelt back across the hall, grasping the book with both hands. Back and forth and back and forth, showing what she’s found to as many people as she can and as fast as her tiny stomping legs can take her. Passing my desk she stops in her tracks and smiles with that glint acquired around age two; the developing understanding of the concept of limits and, specifically, that they can be pushed. I smile back — effectively giving her the green light — and off she runs again. Eventually the girl and her book settle on the lap of mum, who points to the pages and reads the story softly into her ear in German. They took home a children’s book which had been donated earlier that morning.

There have been around 100 books borrowed and more donated than I can count. The generosity is staggering, and the gratitude often goes both ways (too many books and too little space, usually). In the past year, in addition to these books, the library has been gifted: ten small bird nests, one large bird nest, a rowan tree seedling, a jar of rosehip jam, a bottle of wine; a bag of perennial seeds, one photo of a butterfly, a poster of a privet hawk-moth, a poster for listening with, a CD, an ammonite fossil, a handmade sketchbook, a tiny bouquet of wildflowers, a welcome wreath, two wooden chairs (reupholstered in hand-weaved fabric by the donator), a plant; a selection of snacks; one floor cushion made of old ties, one unidentified fossil, a tea towel, a fragment of a wasp’s nest. And time. Precious, priceless time.

It’s a small space, but opening the door at 122B Montgomery Street has pried the world open a little more, letting the good come out. It’s like when, as a kid, I’d watch my step-brother play Civilisation and watch the world reveal itself as he walked out to its edges, lighting up the dark spaces. They weren’t empty, but what they held were yet to be seen.

A library is more than the books it holds. Of course. A restaurant is more than the food it serves. If eateries were taken away I don’t think the public would cry out “Where, now, will we eat?” but rather “Where, now, will we go?” Where will we gather? This year I’ve been more concerned than ever by the eating away of support for arts and leisure spaces and the normality, the perceived inevitability, of increasingly individualist societies and temperaments. Cuts and closures to libraries is just one example of communities having places to gather (for free!) taken away from them. In the library, friend told me with some despondence about a company — I believe it was a bank — advertising how many of their features were now “contactless”. Contactless. I hadn’t thought too much about the word before, and now I can’t get it out of my head. What does a trajectory towards a contactless society mean for a social species? Who has asked for it? Who does it serve? In Electric Dreams: Sex Robots and Failed Promises of Capitalism,

Heather Parry

writes that “the underlying economic system for four decades now has been one that encourages a turn away from communality generally…For all my life, the underlying economic policy has been this; profit for the capitalists must reign supreme, and the idea of human cohesion is a threat to the margins.” This is the economic policy we’ve been given, but it what we’ve asked for? Are we contorting and breaking ourselves to fit a flawed economic system? To paraphrase Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, because I can’t find the quote at the moment, our economy should work for the people, the people shouldn’t work for the economy.

Access to communal spaces, self-led education and leisure, a warm space we don’t have to give someone money to be in, should be a given. It’s not actually a huge ask when you consider what else the government funds. In the last 15 years, one in five public libraries in Scotland have closed. In the middle of a cost of living crisis, a climate crisis and with rising misinformation, I and many other librarians (proper ones) would argue that there should be stronger legislation protecting public libraries from closure. Talking about “the power of words” in the middle of a crisis, climate or humanitarian, feels both futile and irrefutable. Access to trusted information is becoming more important by the day. Worth repeating again and again and again. Actions speak louder than words but words inform and inspire actions and connect those whose paths would otherwise never cross. Closing libraries cuts off this access to information, and to withhold information from a society is to oppress it.

But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death

Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

Across the world, access to information and safe spaces in our communities is a common need. At the time of writing, thirteen public libraries have been damaged or destroyed in Gaza. The fate of others — those part of cultural or educational institutions – is impossible to clarify. One which remains standing at the time of writing is the Maghazi Library, described by Shahd Alnaami as ‘not just a library; it is part of my identity…The occupation is targeting our minds and our bodies, but it does not realise that ideas cannot die. The value of books and libraries, the knowledge they carry, and the identities they help shape are indestructible.’ Back in August, Spellow Library in Liverpool was victim to an arson attack in the far-right fuelled riots. A fundraiser started by a local library user set out to raise £500; they raised £250,000.

One of my most repeated anecdotes of the year comes from an afternoon in spring, not at The Nature Library but standing outside Dumbarton Public Library five minutes before it opened. In that handful of minutes seven women, one baby and a teenage boy gathered, waiting patiently for the doors to unlock. The value of libraries can be difficult to quantify. Their benefits to an individual or to a community might be felt within minutes or after many years, they might accumulate slowly or be felt all at once. While bodily thirst can be quenched by a glass of water (we can see the glass, we can, hopefully, trace where the water came from), the nourishment given by stories, or at the root of all things, information — what we take into our bodies to help shape our own experience and existence — is less tangible. But a library is a physical thing, and a book is a physical thing. Is a story a physical thing? When a story enters a person and becomes part of them, inside their body, somewhere, I don’t know what happens to the line between the two. I’m thinking out loud now but it’s all to say that the past year has me looking at libraries and stories as physical places, and stories almost like objects; while they can be held in the mind for a time, can certainly be, and are, lost, stolen or forgotten, and I don’t want to see that happen.

---

song / book

Bugs and cockroaches, for spring! The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector, with The Bug Collector by Haley Heynderickx.

There I was open-mouthed and offended and withdrawn—faced with the dusty being looking back at me. Take what I saw: because what I was seeing with an embarrassment so painful and so frightened and so innocent, what I was seeing was life looking back at me.

The Passion According to G.H, Clarice Lispector

And there's a centipede
Naked in your bedroom
Oh, and you swear to God
The fucker's out to get you

The Bug Collector, Haley Heynderickx

---

Currently reading: There Are Rivers in the Sky, Elif Shafak

Watch: OCEAN with David Attenborough, out in cinemas, on the realities of the most vital ecosystems on earth.

Sign: the Our Seas petition for the return of an inshore limit in Scotland, protecting its coastal seas from destructive fishing practices

Read: On a related note, Conservation groups hit out at ‘unfulfilled promises’ over Scotland’s seabed in the Herald.

Watch: Israeli strikes devastate Gaza's libraries, erasing resources and heritage.