Silly Report: Small Fuss

Ex Libris, the report of the Adam Smith Institute advocating membership fees and borrowing charges in public libraries, attracted no great attention apart from a few knockabout setpieces in the press and on the radio. NLW's prize for headline of the month goes to the Daily Telegraph of 23 June: two half columns on the report were headed by Fees Demanded to Deter Library Louts. Worth reporting here if only to express editorial belief that there can't be more than two people who read both NLW and the Daily Telegraph. There was also a little to‐do on Radio 4's ‘Stop the Week’ on 28 June with Robert Robinson almost alone defending public libraries, provoking a reference from one of the chatting coterie that something was alright for the ‘Raynes Park literati’. Robinson went to Raynes Park Country Grammar School which in its day was quite a school with W H Auden writing the words of the school song. (Readers in Uttoxeter and Gosport may like to know that the school is hard by the London and South Western Railway and is probably in the new‐fangled London Borough of Merton.) The Times on the same day had a respectable second leader which concluded that the report “should make us think more about how libraries should be managed, what they should stock and who should manage them”.