Stella Gibbons, whose life and books have been featured on here, is another writer who both took out and put in. My first encounter with her work was via books that came from the public library.
Internal evidence from her books suggests to me that Stella Gibbons considered libraries to be an important part of life and that she was very familiar with the various types, not to mention the differing social classes and educational and intellectual levels of the members.
She found much good reading material on the family bookshelves when young, but probably joined a public library too.
As an adult she was a user of her local public library for many years. She may also have subscribed to a circulating library as they were still going strong in the first half of the 20th century despite the competition from the free public libraries and she features two of them in one of her books.
The modern circulating libraries
Circulating libraries did not disappear with the arrival of public libraries for several reasons:
There may not have been a public library within easy reach.
They sometimes had a better range of books on offer than the free libraries did: some public libraries held only a token stock of books.
They provided a way of getting hold of new, popular books on publication when there were very long waiting lists in the public library. Some people who wanted to be among the first readers of certain books were willing to pay for the privilege.
Membership of a circulating library could be a minor status symbol; it showed that someone was respectable and could afford to pay to borrow books.
As with the first wave of circulating libraries, the books were usually to be found in dedicated areas of certain shops.
Boots Book-Lovers’ Library
Boots Book-Lovers' Library was a circulating library run by Boots the Chemist, a chain of chemist shops of which there was usually a branch in every high street. The library service began in 1898 and closed in 1966, defeated by such factors as falling membership, rising costs and the availability of cheap, mass-market paperbacks. It had over one million subscribers at its peak. Most of them were women, often housewives.
There was more than one class of subscription. People who took out the cheapest one could borrow only books that were over a year old. People who paid a premium got the first and best pickings and better personal services. There were even ‘A’ and ‘B’ counters in the shops!
Boots Book-Lovers' Library gets a passing, dismissive mention in Stella Gibbons’s Nightingale Wood:
“At Grassmere no one read books. They occasionally read a thriller from the Boots in Chesterbourne...”
While some of Stella Gibbons’s books contain the odd reference to libraries of various kinds, they are featured in The Rich House (1941). The details she provides here say to me that Stella Gibbons subscribed to at least one circulating library herself. Boots Library is likely to have been the inspiration for some of the material.
A young girl called Mavis works in a superior circulating library in a small seaside town. Pauline, who works in a bank, is a frequent borrower of their books, mainly novels, for her mother. They have conversations about the suitability or otherwise of some of the books.
There is a much inferior Lending Library with Newest Fiction section inside a branch of a chemist shop. The employees are treated shamefully and paid starvation wages.This place is for the common herd; women queuing at the Books counter are described as being fat, middle-aged and ‘bullyish’.
Pauline thinks of this shop as a ‘beastly hole’ and goes in only as a last resort - to buy some cosmetics. She looks at the lurid jackets on the new fiction books and sees nothing to tempt her. Pauline is shocked to see that the Books girl is Mavis, who has lost her job in the high-class library. This feels like going from heaven to hell.
For me, the main character of interest is Reenie, a young woman who lives with her awful mother and works in a fish shop. It is fascinating to see how a few library books expand her mind and transform her life, one small step at a time.
I see her story as another example of Stella Gibbons’s white magic.
Reenie joins the public library just to get some basic information about the Commonwealth and the British Empire, New Zealand in particular. Her interest and imagination have been aroused by seeing exotic people and places on the labels on jars of jam and tins of pineapple and other food!
Her first step is to buy herself ‘a natlas’. This is not enough: she is inspired and feels a longing for more information.
Her employer gives a reference in which he vouches for her respectability and suitability for membership, and she joins the public ‘liberry’ and takes out a book packed with facts and figures about New Zealand.
The next step up is the elite circulating library. Reenie joins at the cheapest tariff and pays tuppence (in the old, pre-decimal money) to borrow a recently-published book that she was unable to find in the public library.
While reading the public library book about New Zealand, an entirely new and exciting idea comes into her mind: what she really wants is to see the exotic place in person.
She eventually emigrates and makes a new life for herself on the other side of the world in the country of her dreams.
A few more library references
The scholarly Richard in The Bachelor (1944) is at the opposite educational extreme from Reenie.
One of his few self-indulgences is a subscription to the elite London Library. He is staying at some distance from London when he needs a particular book on economics. The local public library cannot help, but on request refer him to a small but up-to-date technical library in the town where he finds his book. He is impressed. The library is supported by subscriptions and a small charge to the public, and he thinks that it is performing a useful service.
In Here be Dragons (1956), as soon as her family moves into their new home in Hampstead the scholarly Anna goes to join the public library. She finds it astonishingly good and returns with an armful of books for herself and her husband. Stella lived in the area for most of her life and may have used her own experience here.
The Highgate Library
Stella Gibbons lived close to the Highgate Library from 1936 onwards. She was reported to still be a regular reader there in the 1960s.
The Highgate Library, just like the main and best London library I used when still at school, is a striking Edwardian building that opened in 1906 and is now listed. Andrew Carnegie made a contribution towards its construction.
Huge funding cuts in 2014 threatened its future, but thanks to a group of volunteers it is still open - for the moment.
Highgate Library:
