MY FIRST LIBRARY

A short reminisce about my first library  that was published on the Cilips website in support of their campaign #librariesareessential

Apart from the school library the first library I joined was Airdrie Library.  I would like to claim it was to explore further my love of Shakespeare, or delve into ancient philosophy.

More prosaic reason:  to help me, so I naively believed, talk to girls.  My defence is that I was fourteen at the time, and the phrase `wouldn`t say boo to a goose` springs to mind.  I loved football and sports in general, and my reading was comics especially Roy of the Rovers.  Still love Roy of the Rovers, received an annual of stories as a Christmas present a few years back. I can`t remember back then ever, apart from in school, reading a book.

Airdrie library is a magnificent building with an observatory as part of the building.  I didn`t know that at the time and for a good few years after. Rather than study the stars I had the more pressing need to study words to impress the girls. Naturally the first books taken out were mostly eight hundred pages of close type.  A lot of words in type barely able to read without a Sherlock Holmes type magnifying glass.  Dickens was an early choice. Barnaby Rudge if I remember right the first novel I took out the library.  I got as far as the blurb and a drop jawed flick through the endless pages.  Not then but Dickens is now one of my favourite authors. Reading likes aren`t always instant but can grow with you. I also took out Victor Hugo`s Les Miserables mainly for the fact that it included some poems in French and English translation.  I imagined it casually falling out of my school bag.

` You speak French? ` She said.

` Oui. ` I casually replied.

It stayed in my imagination as I never had the confidence, or good sense prevailed, to try it.  It took me a good while but I did read Les Miserables. 

I still love a hardback full weighted book.  My bookshelves groan with them.

Even though I never did learn how to talk to girls in French, joining the library was the start of my discovery of a world I barely knew existed.

I had always been a dreamer, making up stories inside my head.  That walk through the library doors was the beginning of the realisation that I could write my own stories.  I did and eventually became a full time writer, after many years working in a textile factory.

There are many other reasons to enter a library alongside taking out books.

Company; information; the road to confidence; escape into another world.

I always think of the library as like the Tardis.   So much bigger on the inside than out.  Once you travel in a library you are never the same person again but an expansion of yourself.  A library doesn`t belong to anyone or exist in the now, but to everyone and is timeless

Tom Murray Writer

Scottish Book Trust Reader In Residence to Scottish Borders Libraries 2013-2014