I still remember the first library ticket I ever had. It must have been about
1957. My mother took me to the public library just off Battersea Park Road and
enrolled me. I was thrilled. All those books, and I was allowed to borrow
whichever I wanted! And I remember some of the first books I borrowed and fell
in love with: the Moomin books by Tove Jansson; a French novel for children
called A Hundred Million Francs; why did I like that? Why did I read it over
and over again, and borrow it many times? I don't know. But what a gift to give
a child, this chance to discover that you can love a book and the characters in
it, you can become their friend and share their adventures in your own
imagination.

And the secrecy of it! The blessed privacy! No-one else can get in the way,
no-one else can invade it, no-one else even knows what's going on in that
wonderful space that opens up between the reader and the book. That open
democratic space full of thrills, full of excitement and fear, full of
astonishment, where your own emotions and ideas are given back to you
clarified, magnified, purified, valued. You're a citizen of that great
democratic space that opens up between you and the book. And the body that gave
it to you is the public library. Can I possibly convey the magnitude of that
gift?

Somewhere in Blackbird Leys, somewhere in Berinsfield, somewhere in Botley,
somewhere in Benson or in Bampton, to name only the communities beginning with
B whose libraries are going to be abolished, somewhere in each of them there is
a child right now, there are children, just like me at that age in Battersea,
children who only need to make that discovery to learn that they too are
citizens of the republic of reading. Only the public library can give them that
gift.

	-- Phillip Pullman, "This is the Big Society, you see. It must be big,
				to contain so many volunteers."
		http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/philip-pullman/this-is-big-society-you-see-it-must-be-big-to-contain-so-many-volunteers