“The remorseless destruction of our national public library system continues. Librarians are sacked, books sold or thrown away, and buildings closed. Unison estimates that nearly 500 of the country’s 3,100 libraries are being cut. No one expects things to get better, or even to stop getting worse. But it did not need to happen like this. The collapse marks a failure of will and imagination not an inevitability….

“[The] vision of public libraries as an essential part of a functioning literate nation was lost here before we realised it was gone. In the great general turning from the state we failed to understand that one of the things that taxes ought to fund is a general, unglamorous and reliable access to culture for everyone.”

– The Guardian View on the Loss of Public Libraries

You can read the full article here.

(The photograph above is from the London Blitz, 1940s.)