By Mary Adams, AWC The Hague
This book reminds me of how our lives and relationships can be enhanced by books. In 1958, Sylvia Blackwell arrives in the small town of East Mole as librarian for the Children’s Library. The library is declining, and Sylvia makes it her job to re-introduce literature to children and adults. Vickers gently and quietly unfolds the power of books in friendships, scholastic aspirations, love and death.
Did you know that in the late 1950s, most governments had especially banned four books, including The Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller? What sort of tomfoolery happens when a copy is discovered in East Mole? Vickers has written a snapshot of small-town nostalgia, prejudices, and freedom. The book pays homage to the books the author herself loved in childhood and ends with a list of “Recommended Reading” from East Mole Library. Book reviews of The Librarian are mixed. However, I do think that it contains an important message about access to literacy and education and the importance of libraries. Here is the insight from one of Sylvia Blackwell’s child proteges:
“As you can tell, I am a passionate supporter of libraries, especially for children who might otherwise have no access to the resources of children’s literature. Children are the citizens of the future and what they are fed and nourished on will form the destiny of our world and the destiny of our beleaguered planet. We have a duty, a moral duty, to ensure that not only the stomachs of our children are fed but also their imaginations. We do not – here she paused and swept a glance around her audience – ‘we emphatically do not want to find that we have reached such a state of dearth in our society that we must provide food banks for the imagination as well as, as we so regrettably have to do today, for the physical body. Up and down the country there are local libraries, granaries of rich supplies, potential feasts of nourishment, often gifted, as this library was, by benefactors for the good of children, their children and the future of our children’s children and our children’s future children’s children, which it is sheer wickedness to waste and destroy. But we also need guardians of this wealth, to ensure that it reaches those who may not know they are hungry: our civilisation – a civilisation that is now under threat.”
Photo by Mary Adams.
