Miscellany

Why do writers need libraries?

Why do writers need libraries? For the same reasons – and more – that other people within the community need libraries:

- for easy access to information;
- to continue informally with life-long education;
- for their leisure time reading and resource use.

Information is the lifeblood of any enterprise. If you don’t know, you can’t do. You need to know all the possibilities and what the limitations might be. For example, I am writing The Poetry Activity Book about the reading and writing of poetry. I want this to be firmly New Zealand-based and biased.

My research has included:

- checking out the competition – has anyone published anything similar?
- checking out the market – what is my readership likely to be?
- checking out the content against what’s available both to borrow and to browse through in
Tauranga libraries, in other public, academic and national libraries and through inter-library
loans;
- checking out a publisher – who is likely to be interested in my manuscript and who will do
best by me?
- checking out copyright for quoted poems and excerpts, and sourcing illustrations.

My education has included:

- learning from what other writers write that is similar to or different from what I want to write;
- learning from the past and from the present, because writers are part of a literary tradition
yet must write in the here and now;
- learning about tactics, techniques and tools for a writer;
- learning about the resources available and how to use them from trained, interested
and responsive professionals.

I could expand on how much libraries have offered me both as a reader and a writer over the years, from early childhood to the present day. I am a teacher and a librarian and a writer and an editor, and in all these roles my local library has never failed me. I was worried about coming to New Zealand, because I was used to the resources of a much older country, with access in London and York to the two prime resources – the British Library in Paddington, a legal deposit library whose books go back to the Middle Ages, and the British Lending Library at Boston Spa, whose proud boast is they can get you any book anywhere in the world.

I need not have worried. In the years I have lived in Tauranga, I have come to appreciate that, whatever else it lacks for the cultured mind and the artistic temperament, it has a supremely good library service with the most friendly and helpful staff I have ever come across.

I ought to know: I was one of them for a while, and it was a privilege to be a member of this dedicated and hard-working band of enthusiasts. Reading is both my work and my relaxation – I come here to study magazines I might write for, subjects I might write about, and anything else I need to know to do my job properly and to enjoy my hours off.

One practical job I enjoyed doing for the two years I was employed there was checking the catalogue against a list of names to see which writers were going to benefit that year from the authors fund. New Zealand is a peculiar market in which to sell books. Our biggest book chain is Whitcoulls, which is not New Zealand-owned and which seems to have a prejudice against New Zealand writers, and against local and self-published books.

Self-publishing, especially of family and community history, has been a strength of New Zealand literature, and it is supported here by the purchases made for the New Zealand Room – and what a treasure-house for the writer that is – and by a very supportive bookshop, Books-a-Plenty, privately owned and a strong contributor to the Bay’s book ethos.

We can’t buy all the books we’d like to, even to help our fellow-writers. We can go to their book launches, often held in libraries. We can borrow their books from the library so they qualify for author’s fund payments. We can request their books, so that every library buys a copy and increases sales.

Another peculiarity of the New Zealand book markets is how small it is. In a population of four million, with one quarter of that population aged between 18 and 35 living and working abroad, with children and the unemployed and retired not contributing except indirectly to the national income, we have a small customer base to sell our books to. Yet New Zealand is also a country that sells many of its books abroad, to praise and honour; and where at home it has the highest percentage of readers and writers per capita among the population in the English-speaking world.

We also have a strong tradition of supporting the literary arts – a huge number of funds and grants available, including the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Merit if John Key agrees to keep that up. Creative Tauranga has been a friend to writers in the Bay.

But the library has been our biggest support, mainly because libraries create readers, and reading creates thinkers and doers, and without readers, writers will dwindle and decline. Finally, do remember that writers don’t only write for magazines and books. Nearly everything you pick up from the instructions on a soup packet to the screenplay for your Saturday video has been written by a writer.

Writers, I would argue, whose growth and development has been assisted by a healthy, innovative and proactive library service.

posted by Jenny Argante @ 6:38 PM