Between the lines: a reader at the British Museum library in 1952
Photograph: Bert Hardy/Getty
I'm going to post research on libraries as well as on bookstores. Here's a lovely article written by Bella Bathrust on The Observer, Sunday 1 May 2011.
Quotes:
"The great untold truth of libraries is that people need them not because they're about study and solitude, but because they're about connection."
"It's
an odd thing that libraries – by tradition temples to the unfleshly
– can sometimes seem such sexy places. Perhaps it's their
churchiness or the deep, soft silence produced by so many layers of
print, or simply the hiding places provided by the shelves.
"There's a big following on the internet for sites on librarians
and people with library fetishes,"
"In
the 60s, before the Lady
Chatterley trial,"
says Ian Stringer, "you
used to get block books – literally, wooden blocks in place of any
books the librarians thought were a bit risqué, like Last
Exit to Brooklyn.
You had to bring the block to the counter and then they'd give you
the book from under the desk. So of course you got a certain type of
person just going round looking for the wooden blocks."
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