Keep Elma Turner

An open letter to mayor Nick Smith: please Sir, can we have our library back? Despite the best efforts of our lovely, ever-helpful librarians, the so called ‘‘pop-up library’’ doesn’t really work.

Surely the principle pleasure of libraries and bookstores, is, as it is for liquor stores, browsing and discovering random delights and treasures.

Requesting the volumes you want is pretty soulless – this sort of ‘‘system’’ enabled numbers of statecontrolled North American booze outlets to run at a substantial loss selling liquor, improbable as this may seem.

We, the frustrated patrons of our beloved and entirely adequate Elma Turner Library, harbour dark suspicions that the previous, agenda-addled administration of this city, seeking ‘‘concrete’’ reasons to promote their visionary submersible library, invented actuarially negligible reasons to shutter the old establishment. The Trafalgar Centre debacle engineered by the same ‘‘riskaverse’’ crew establishes pedigree in these murky matters.

Even were there to be any sort of risk of cascading ceiling tiles, surely it is not beyond the wit of man to mitigate such.

Every building site in Nelson is at some stage hung with nets to capture plummeting tradespeople – a weightier proposition than the acoustic tile.

Does this not suggest a not inappropriate fishing theme? Swags of nets, glass floats, stuffed sea creatures and staff fetchingly dressed as matelots, the better to invoke the sub-aqua pleasures of the library that will now never be.

Seriously, why are we still trapped by the follies and cumbersome gambits of the dysfunctional dinosaurs of the past?

We prize our library, we use it, we like it and, as consumers, always found in Elma Turner’s embrace much more to like than to grumble over.

Jim Mitchell

Nelson, November 17