An Ode to Libraries by Daisy May Johnson

Many, if not all, members of the FCBG will resonate with this ode to libraries written especially for us by author Daisy May Johnson!

I have always navigated my life by libraries. When I last moved house, I remember asking the estate agent where the nearest library was. It turned out to be in a small car park, a portacabin surrounded by low-hanging trees, and when I went in for a look around, I knew that I could live here. The library was calling me home.

But then, that’s what a good library does. It provides home and safety and space for people who need it and for those who do not even know they need it until the world comes crashing down around them. They are an expression of hope in the world and one of our greatest achievements as a people. They are also powered by some of the best people that I have ever met.

As a deeply bookish child, libraries saved me. I read enormously, far beyond anything that my pocket money could sustain, and so I turned to my library and I read that instead. I worked my way through the children’s section and then I explored everything else. Non-fiction. Poetry. Biography. All of it. And as I did, I began to build myself as a writer. I learnt how the written word can make me feel, what it can do, and what I wanted it to do.

Enid Blyton was everywhere in my library. I read about Malory Towers and St Clare’s, and then found other boarding school stories: Anne Digby’s Trebizon and Redheads at the Chalet School by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer. I remember a great swathe of Judy Blume and Paula Danziger, both of whom wrote about things I did not always understand but made me laugh and love them with every word. There were shelves full of pony books too; the hold of the Pullein-Thompson sisters hadn’t yet quite been broken upon publishing, and the eternal Black Beauty and alongside this, Misty of Chincoteague and The Silver Brumby and Jill who had two ponies (frankly greedy), and Jackie who won a pony and all of them left me desperately wishing for a pony to materialise before me and just be mine. I entered a thousand competitions in Pony because of them.

Every inch of How To Be Brave, How To Be True and my newest: How To Be Free is built on the libraries that built me then and the libraries that continue to build me now. They’re built on a joyful, chaotic Saturday morning when everybody in the entire world has come in to get a new book and the queue for help stretches out of the door; on readers who tremble with excitement as they won the Summer Reading Challenge and the readers who’ve just discovered a new author. They’re built on stacks of face out picture books; on librarians holding story-time, surrounded by rapt readers of several different generations; and on my sprawling, endless reservation list.

But most of all, they’re built on what libraries and librarians do every single day. The world is a difficult place for anybody to live in and it can exert a considerable amount of effort to take your story away from you. I want my readers to own their story. I want them to know that their story can be in any shape they want. I want them to be true to themselves. I want them to be brave and live their lives without fear. I want them to be free.

And I want them to know that the librarians? They’ve got their back.

Just as they’ve got everybody’s back.