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The Library Book launched at Pimlico Library

The Reading Agency had a great evening last night at Pimlico Library with Profile Books, as we launched The Library Book. Writers, publishers, librarians all gathered to support libraries and the vital role they play in people’s lives and in promoting reading and literacy. Here is some of what was said.

Andrew Franklin, Managing Director of Profile Books: ‘The Library Book was conceived by one of our editors, Ruth Gray, because she was as upset as everyone in this room is by the impending closure of so many libraries, and the damage that would do. All of you who are here tonight are evidence that so many people do care about libraries. The Library Book is a fantastic campaigning document in support of libraries, with personal accounts of the transformative effects libraries have had on the authors … and you can multiply that by all the people in this room.’

Tom Holland, author and contributor,: ‘Of course as a writer I am in favour of libraries; literary folk are keen on libraries so you would expect me to be in favour of them! But we have to make a case for continuing to invest in libraries as an economic priority. Because it is obvious that one of the great strengths we have as a nation is that we speak the lingua franca of the world … and we should be encouraging everything to do with that.

All libraries are making the same statement to everyone who passes by, about the primacy of books, the primacy of literacy. That will surely feed into our economic future – literacy, literature and the written word: libraries are an incredible British success story, and even speaking the language of the ledger book, libraries are an absolutely crucial investment.’

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Hardeep Singh Kohli, author and contributor: ‘Lionel Shriver, Alan Bennett and Stephen Fry – this is the calibre of the people who are passionate about libraries and have put their names to this campaign.

Standing in this library, you can see a William Boyd novel, a documentary on Lemmy and a large print Mills and Boon book. Where else can you stand and see that coming together of the random that is so important about libraries? Because libraries are lost on you if you think they are just about books. They are about communities and bringing them together. and I think this should be the single most compelling reason to champion libraries now.

There are many things that have happened in the last ten years that I would not want to put my name to. I don’t want to part of the generation that was responsible for closing libraries.’


Miranda McKearney, director of The Reading Agency: ‘These days, so much of a charity’s work is about chasing funding, and that nearly always involves huge amounts of work on tenders and bids, with an increasingly slim chance of success. So the out of the blue call from Profile Books saying they wanted to donate the proceeds from a book about libraries to our work was quite an extraordinary lift – and definitely won the prize for the nicest phone call of 2011! And it just got better as the names came rolling in of all the people who were contributing.

There are 40 new libraries opening in the UK during 2012, and we need to be championing a really positive vision for the future.

The money we receive from The Library Book will be used towards our two UK-wide six book challenges – the Summer Reading Challenge for children and the Six Book Challenge for adults with low literacy – which we run with libraries right across the network: we need to keep them growing and not decaying.’

Library Book launch

Published on National Libraries Day 2012, The Library Book brings together some of our most outstanding writers who tell us all about how libraries are used, why they’re important and describe libraries real or imagined. All royalties from The Library Book are coming to The Reading Agency to support our library reading programmes, so please buy your copy.

See more pictures from the launch.

Photo credit: www.fenris.co.uk

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