Books & Reading
To read is to enter into another world, to go beyond the Self, to be informed, to be consoled. The power of books — not just novels, but coherently written biography and history — comes from their power to hold us, to detain us into paying attention. So much that happens in life nowadays, a certain effervescence that is encouraged by the media and by targeted advertising, is momentary, fretful, dissolving of our daily hours. E.M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, reminds us that even when novels are about wicked people they console us: ‘they suggest a more comprehensible and thus a more manageable human race, they give us the illusion of perspicacity and of power.’
In recent decades public libraries have gone though a number of challenging and very expensive transformations; through Information Science, and digitization of catalogues and periodicals, as well as Web Access provision. But the Public Library’s core patrimony is still found in its extensive holding of books, in the preservation of key book-stock held through changes of fashion and politics; until, over time, the Public Library becomes a biography of that most permanent of citizens, the Constant Reader.
Cork City Libraries and its constant readers have been friends over many generations. It remains one of our fervent ambitions to serve the constant readers of Cork and its environs. We welcome new friends, new borrowers, new kinds of readers from the traditional suburbs as well as the new communities. For a Librarian there’s no greater joy than to connect a reader with a much sought-after book, to have been the ferry upon which another book is docked at the waiting reader’s desk.
And so it is a feast, a feast of books and reading. Staff in Cork City Libraries have been open to their constant and curious readers for well over a century. Despite the digital age, the printed book remains the best and most flexible, and battery-less, entertainment console that is available in our frantic modern age. The book is alive and well. Even as you read these words, who knows what marvellous proposals have just reached the agent’s or publisher’s desk in Cork or Dublin or London. One thing is certain, the public library is where you’ll find the book when it is published: here you can read that book; here you can borrow it. At Cork City Libraries, meet the new and the constant readers who have also come to borrow and to read. All of us are free to participate in the great companionship of the book.