The last thing you want in a library is a bookworm

SINCE the great ancient library at Alexandria burnt to the ground in 48 BC, with the loss of up to 700,000 irreplaceable scrolls, libraries have been under threat.

These days, it’s from government, both local and national, who see libraries purely as a cost and very rarely as an opportunity.

My guess is that three-quarters of the people reading this have fond memories of libraries: some from childhood, some from last Tuesday. Libraries matter and they always will.

Meanwhile, for those of us who have a favourite desk in the library and are liable to leave and work elsewhere if someone is already sitting in our spot, comes this brief, but invaluable, little book.

It’s a collection of weird facts and stories about libraries. And where was it researched? You guessed right. It’s published by the Bodleian Library in Oxford, where I sat staring out of the window some 35 years ago, and which has taken a copy of every new book published in the UK since 1662. (These days, it takes only those it wants, so the latest James Patterson may be conspicuous by its absence.)

‘Fire and flame’ have long been banned from the Bodleian to protect the books, which meant that opening hours were severely limited to daylight until artificial light was finally installed thoughout the building in 1929.

Here, at last, is a rundown of the Dewey Decimal system of library classification, with which I have been strangely fascinated for years. Of the ten major classes (or categories),

only the prolific writer Isaac Asimov is said to have been represented in nine of them. The only category he failed to produce a book in was ‘100 — Philosophy’.

The largest library fine ever paid was for the children’s poetry book Days And Deeds, by Burton E. Stevenson, which was taken out of the library in Kewanee, Illinois, in 1955 and not returned until 47 years later. It accrued a fine of two cents a day, which came to $345.14.

The polar explorer Ernest Shackleton was a bibliophile and once took a printing press on one of his expeditions.

He thus became the first person ever to publish a book on Antarctica, where he printed and bound Aurora Australis in 1909, using wooden boards fashioned from a tea chest.

Before the British Library Reading Room opened to the general public, famous people allowed in included Bram Stoker, Thomas Hardy, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (better known as Lenin), George Orwell, Virginia Woolf and Mahatma Gandhi. There are 13 Presidential Libraries in America. Barack Obama’s is in Chicago and isn’t expected to be completed until 2020. Will Trump’s library have any books in it?

Ms Cock- Starkey lists eight ‘Enemies of the Library’: vandals, pests, light, humidity, temperature, fire, flood and pollution.

Insects are a particular menace. Acquisitions of old books are often quarantined to ensure against infestations.

At the Rococo Library in Portugal’s Mafra National Palace, a colony of bats is allowed to live there to eat the book-damaging bugs.

The only thing more fun than reading this book would have been compiling it. It’s a total delight.