Libraries are bigger on the inside by Manon Steffan Ros
We are sharing a beautiful guest blog from award winning author, Manon Steffan Ros- a celebration of awards and libraries!
Libraries are Bigger on the Inside
I remember the book. The colours on the cover were muted, and there was a beautiful drawing of two girls sitting atop a pile of clothes, one looking thoroughly fed up and the other mid-sentence. The pages smelled dry and woody, like the book corner in my classroom. The book was Goggle Eyes by Anne Fine, and thinking about it squeezes my heart still, like the memory of an old crush that hasn’t quite gone away.
I remember that story as if it is one of my own memories, as if I knew the characters. And I remember it because of a sentence that was on the back- Winner of the Carnegie Award. I had no idea what that meant, and even less of an idea about how to pronounce it (CAR-negie? Car-NE-gie?) but I noticed, as I hungrily worked my way through the library bookshelves, that it appeared on the cover of some of my favourite books. Wolf by Gillian Cross. The Ghost of Thomas Kempe by Penelope Lively.
Last year was very kind to me. Now, my own book, The Blue Book of Nebo, earned that esteemed word on its cover, and won the Yoto Carnegie medal for writing. It had been my secret, ridiculously unrealistic dream to win, but I’d filed it with the other ridiculous hopes, like visiting the moon and singing a duet with James Taylor. The realisation of this dream has been such an honour, especially as it circles back to one of the major influences of my life – libraries.
The silence and stillness of libraries have, for me, been bursting with noise and movement- within each of the books are whole worlds, communities of people for me to love and hate and understand. A library is a TARDIS – How can a building, sometimes one room within a building, hold all that space and weight and knowledge? It is miraculous that marks on paper can do what they do.
Years after finding Goggle Eyes on a library shelf, I found myself sitting in a different town library, hunched over my laptop, creating my own marks for paper and hoping to create worlds for readers. It was the only space that I was allowed to occupy within the community which had no expectation that I’d be spending money. I could write, keep warm, use the internet, browse the books when the writing got difficult. No one asked anything of me. I was given warm smiles and it felt like such an honour, writing a story in that cradle of stories.
Yes, I remember Goggle Eyes, and I remember finding the Flossie Teacake books by Hunter Davies in Bangor Library too, the edges between the world of the book and the physical space in the library becoming blurred in my imagination. I remember my teacher handing me Ted Hughes’ Iron Man in the school library, not knowing the weight of all that iron I’d be carrying gladly forevermore. And I remember taking my own children to the town library, and realising that all of us could occupy different worlds together in this squat, 1970s miraculous building. Yes, a library is like a TARDIS, and so is a book- so much bigger on the inside.
