Autumn 2011 Volume 25 - No 3 - BC BookWorld

27 BC BOOKWORLD AUTUMN 2011
LIBRARIES, eBOOKS & YOU
COMMISSIONED WORKS
don’t always engage a
wider audience. The
Library Book: A History of
Service to British Columbia
(BC Library Association $50) is
a welcome exception.
To mark the 100th anniversary
of the B.C. Library Association,
Dave Obee has told a
fascinating tale of banned books,
anti-communist witch hunts, skirmishes
between libraries and
dedicated souls who have served
the province’s book-lovers.
This is a large format book by
and for book people, with plenty
of illustrations, including incidental
cartoons by Adrian
Raeside.
Better still, The Library Book
has pictures of bookmobiles. Lots
of ’em.
There are bookmobiles
wheezing up dirt roads in the
Fraser Valley, edging along a
snowy John Hart Highway (between
Prince George and
Dawson Creek) and stopped in
the middle of nowhere, flagged
down by eager readers.
When the Okanagan Regional
Library retired its mobile
unit in 1992, the
North Shuswap
hamlet of Celista
took off the tires,
put a flower box on
the hood and made
Shane
McCUNE
it a permanent
branch.
As a boy I loved
Fraser Valley
Bookmobile, 1940s,
from The Library Book
Shane McCune reviews The Library Book
by Dave Obee to mark the 100th anniversary
of the BC Library Association
books and I loved trucks, so the
bookmobile was second only to the ice
cream truck in the pantheon of wheeled
heroes.
Maybe Obee and book designer
Roger Handling felt the same way.
✍
ALONG WITH 2,500 OTHER COMMUNITIES
in the English-speaking world, Vancouver,
Victoria and New Westminster
launched their first true public libraries
with seed money from U.S. tycoon
Andrew Carnegie, who spent the
last years of his life giving away some of
the fortune he had amassed by paying
steelworkers $10 for an 84-hour week
and housing them in slums.
In an echo of that paternalism, the
earliest lending libraries in remote parts
of the province were often small book
collections provided by employers in
company towns and work camps.
It took the baroquely named
Ethelbert Olaf Stuart
Scholefield, B.C. provincial librarian
at the beginning of the last century,
to start the march toward organized
public libraries throughout the province.
The B.C. Library Association was
launched at a meeting in his office.
He died in 1919, the year the Public
Library Commission was created. It soon
heard from book-hungry library trustees
in Nanaimo, Duncan, Alberni and
Sidney. All borrowed
books from the Victoria
library, to be exchanged
four times a year, for a
charge of $65 for every
100 books.
When Victoria’s city
council demanded more
money from neighbouring
municipalities for use
of its library, Saanich and
Esquimalt balked, and
their residents were cut
off. Monitors were posted
to make sure interlopers
from the suburbs didn’t
slip into the reading room.
THE FUTURE IS
Honey, you smell like Shakespeare
According to the hype, the eccentric designer Karl Lagerfeld,
as creative director for Chanel and Fendi, has announced a
fragrance called Paper Passion. No, it won’t smell like a musty,
mouldy old paperback. The goal is to replicate the odour of a
freshly printed hardcover. Here at BC BookWorld, we’ve never
CENTURY
1
Such internecine sniping dogged the
fitful growth of library networks for decades.
The PLC’s decision in late 1929 to
launch the world’s first regional library
network in the Fraser Valley angered
other regions, especially the Okanagan
ALREADY
Karl Lagerfeld: Ooo-la-la, books are sexy.
and Vancouver Island.
The 1960s saw turf wars between the
Greater Victoria board, which claimed
dominion over all lands south of the
Malahat, and the Nanaimo-based Vancouver
Island Regional Library, which
planted its flag as far southwest as
Colwood.
Richmond was the biggest contributor
to the Fraser Valley system until it
pulled out in 1975, sparking a feud that
took six months, a court action and a
$100,000 payment to settle. Surrey soon
withdrew as well, though with less rancour.
But infighting among libraries has
often been overshadowed by conflicts
with municipal politicians. The most
notorious example of this was the firing
of John Marshall, to which Obee
devotes an entire chapter.
In 1954, with red-baiting at
a fever pitch, the Victoria Public
Library Board fired Marshall
two months after he had been
hired to launch a mobile book
service.
No reason was given, but it
soon emerged that some “public
spirited citizens” told the
board that Marshall had
continued on page 28
PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY BOOK
In 1951, after the Burns
Lake library moved to a
new home, the original
library still had its sign
above the door.
HAPPENING
heard of him either. But supposedly this guy has a personal
library of 300,000 books. So, of course, Paper Passion will be
marketed inside a hollowed book. Get out your Kindle, fondle
your iPad. Sniff your partner. In the Dark Ages, a book was an
exotic item. Welcome to the New Dark Ages.