‘The most important tool of industry’ (J P Lamb, Yorkshire Post – Monday 26 September 1932)

Posted on June 5, 2017 by Val Hewson

Libraries are under threat today. Councils say there is not enough money. People claim that, with Google, Kindle and the like, there is simply no longer a need for buildings filled with paper or the librarians who look after it. Sometimes the lack of funds and the redundancy of print are combined, justifying cutbacks or closure in an unconvincingly circular argument. Meanwhile, defenders[i] (they are many and we at Reading Sheffield are of their number) point out that libraries are safe, social spaces. They secure and organise knowledge efficiently, impartially and to accepted standards. The information they hold is available to all, in support of democracy and free speech. Librarians are expert guides who help us find what we need. (This is not to dismiss the internet, which is powerful but altogether less discriminating.)

Librarians have always had to promote their services to potential users. At its annual conference in September 1932, the Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux[ii] discussed how to encourage businesses to use libraries. According to a report in the Yorkshire Post on 26 September, Bertie Headicar, the librarian of the London School of Economics, commented on the need to win business trust. There was the ‘difficulty of the library user who dare not tell the librarian what books he wants’ for fear of appearing ignorant or giving away secrets. ‘No true librarian,’ asserted Headicar, ‘was capable of [such betrayal].’ (You can hear the ‘harrumph’.)

The City Librarian of Sheffield, Joseph Lamb, said:

The ordinary man completely fails to grasp the fact that in these days, when national economic survival is largely a question of applied and organised intelligence, the book has become the most important tool of industry. … The public library can provide material and an organisation which will help industry in the unceasing fight to maintain its position, and further developments are possible. But we are faced with the problem of convincing commerce and industry of the library’s ability to do these things.

Lamb lamented that only rarely did industrialists use scientific and merchants, commercial libraries.

In the year 1932, a great firm in my city was not aware that British patents specifications were stocked at the library, though they had been there for fifty years.

Headicar and Lamb agreed about the contribution made by the thoughtful, professional librarian. ‘Nothing mechanical could take the place of the human element…and the personal contact with the librarian,’ said Headicar. (Today’s librarians, mindful of the search engine, might substitute ‘technological’ for ‘mechanical’.) Lamb thought that public librarians could be better at selecting reference library stock. Many, he said, still thought ‘in terms of pure literature.’ He went on, in typically trenchant tones:

They brought to their task of keeping up to date a modern scientific library the outlook of the cloister and shrank from the ruthless modernity of weeding. The staggering pace of research, the extraordinary development of the application of chemical processes to industry, left them a little bewildered.

The Yorkshire Post article notes that there had been meetings with businessmen in Yorkshire, to tell them what libraries could do for them, but these had been poorly attended. ‘Our Yorkshire business men must be assured of value for money.’ (It was ever thus.)

Back home in Sheffield, Lamb did not give up the fight to convince businesses of the value for money of the library service. He must in fact have been planning his next move as he spoke at the conference. Sheffield’s ‘economic survival’ depended almost exclusively on steel and other metals. Lamb’s innovative Scheme for the Interchange of Technical Publications, introduced in 1933, was a partnership between his library and local industry for collecting and exchanging technical and commercial information. SINTO (the Sheffield Interchange Organisation), as it later became known, lasted into the 21^st century. Lamb also oversaw the establishment of the World Metals Index (WMI), a comprehensive listing of grade names, trade names, series numbers and abbreviations of metals, which survives to this day. Finally, in 1955, he wrote Commercial and Technical Libraries, a handbook published by the Library Association.

Here is an example, from librarian Alysoun Bagguley’s memories, of SINTO helping local industry.

In 1970, when fire almost destroyed the Britannia Bridge over the Menai Strait, Alysoun unearthed invaluable information about Robert Stephenson’s original, Victorian construction for Husband & Co, the Sheffield consulting engineers helping re-build the bridge.

What lessons are we to take from this story? Libraries have knowledge in depth, curated by experts. They gather their holdings over time (weeding as they go, as Lamb advised) and without bias. They change and develop, according to the needs of their borrowers. They are, not stuffy mausoleums, but living institutions. They lived in the days of Lamb and Headicar, and they do now.

[i] Ironically, of course, many of us use the internet to promote our views.

[ii] Founded in 1924 and now known as ASLIB, the Association for Information Management.

On the BBC: ‘The more we read the more we live.’

Posted on May 7, 2017 by Val Hewson

The more we read the more we live. The better our reading is the better our living is sure to be. Food, clothing and shelter are requisites of life, but reading is necessary for complete living.

This sentiment – authoritative, clear and aspirational – is at the heart of a talk given on the BBC’s first Sheffield station, 6FL, on Thursday 27 January 1927.[i] The speaker was the city librarian, Richard J Gordon (1881-1966), and the broadcast was for a series entitled ‘How Sheffield’s City Departments Work’. As a whole, this sounds worthy, even dull, but Gordon, who had, a colleague said[ii], ‘an innate flair for saying and doing the right thing at the right time,’ is fascinating for what he tells us about the ambition felt for public libraries by the people who ran them in the early twentieth century.

Sheffield was lucky to have Richard Gordon. A ‘dynamic person who believed so passionately in the civilising mission of public libraries’, he ‘added lustre to his profession,’ say his obituaries.[iii] His lifetime contribution was recognised when he was chosen as President of the Library Association in 1947.

The converted music hall on Surrey St, which served as half of the central library in Gordon’s day. It was inconvenient and unsafe. (Photo:{{PD-US}} – published in the U.S. before 1923 and public domain in the U.S.)

Gordon arrived in Sheffield in 1921, when the public libraries were stagnating (a strong word but the one used in the official history[iv]). Sheffield had made a good start: in 1856 it was the first city in Yorkshire to adopt the 1850 Public Libraries Act allowing corporations to establish free libraries. For the next half century, things went quite well, with central lending and reference libraries and branches opening. But then the service declined, to the extent that in 1920 the Council shamefacedly asked the chief librarian of Leeds to assess the problems and recruited, from 60 applicants, the chief librarian of Rochdale, Richard Gordon, to rebuild the service. The challenge is set out in City Libraries of Sheffield 1856-1956:

… the bookstocks were so bad throughout the lending libraries, and the administrative methods had fallen so far behind … What little money was available was wasted by bibliographical incompetence both in book selection and binding… The buildings were revoltingly dirty, both externally and internally… The staff … had been actively discouraged from attempting to qualify in their profession …

A letter to the Sheffield Independent in April 1920 said that the libraries were a ‘disgrace to a city of such importance’ and blamed the ‘Council’s absurd policy of parsimony’.

By 1927, when he spoke on the radio, Gordon was revolutionising the libraries. New books were bought and old, worn-out ones removed. The staff were re-organised and new systems designed. Open access shelving was introduced.[v] Information and publicity campaigns were initiated. The central libraries were reformed, five branch libraries attractively renovated, a children’s branch library opened, the school library service expanded and plans laid for a much-needed, new central library building.

Walkley library – where Gordon opened a children’s library in 1924, which was used by many of our readers.

Highfield Branch Library, renovated and re-opened in 1923.

These achievements are evident in Gordon’s radio talk: ‘Much has been done to make the libraries worthy of their name, but much more remains to be done.’ More importantly, Gordon used the opportunity to make the case for reading and for public libraries. (Although our situation today is very different, his arguments still have merit). Libraries were, he said, ‘community schools where all may increase and supplement their education’, although their contribution to the ‘national educational structure is but, as yet, dimly recognised.’ An experienced local authority man, Gordon pointed out that the libraries were good value (11d – £4.70 today – per head, less than in other northern cities), offering ‘[information] freely placed at the service of the public; competent counsel in the choice of books; [and] where to look for the required information…’ He aimed, he said, to ‘attract and cultivate readers’, including children, and to anticipate and supply people’s needs:

If we have not the book wanted don’t hesitate to say so. If you do not tell us what you want, we are only able to guess at your requirements …

He went on:

Please do not mistake my meaning regarding this, I mean requirements of books of real value, and not merely of recreational interest.

‘Books of real value’ is an important phrase for Gordon and other librarians of the day. Free libraries were part of the great social reforms of the mid-19^th century, founded with a view to the improvement, the self-improvement, of the working classes. Reading for pleasure and reading fiction (particularly the cheaper sort) were frowned upon. By the 1920s, librarians had mellowed somewhat, but the focus on education remained, along with the feeling that ratepayers’ money must be spent on the worthwhile, rather than the entertaining. So Gordon said:

[The central library] is not for readers who require only the latest popular novel, unless it should happen to be the work of a novelist of admitted quality. In general the libraries do not provide, as new, the ordinary novel. They do not have the money for the purpose, even supposing the ordinary novel was worth its price.

And:

Too often the public library is only thought and spoken of in connection with the reading of novels, and without detracting in the slightest degree from the value to the people of the library’s service in providing recreational reading, yet I would emphasise the contribution it offers to the raising of the standard of general intelligence which is the library’s greatest value to the city.

Gordon concluded: ‘I believe the libraries have something for everybody … I hope many more will … find pleasure and profit in [them].’ The broadcast was clearly part of a communications strategy, aiming to draw Sheffielders in. There were also updates in the local press and trade papers, public lectures, reading lists, exhibitions and slogans such as ‘The Library exists for Books, Information, and Service’. But it seems likely that Gordon was also talking to his employers, the Council. He emphasised the benefits of the library service, including as a means of profiting local industry, and he talked confidently of growth: ‘…when our library service expands, as it must expand…’ A library, he said, is ‘books made productive’.

1927 was to be Gordon’s last year in Sheffield. Shortly after the broadcast, he started a new job as chief librarian in Leeds. There were press suggestions that Sheffield had itself to blame, as the salary offered was well below that of other northern cities. He stayed in Leeds for the rest of his career, and was much praised for its libraries. In Sheffield, he was succeeded by his equally energetic and insightful deputy, Joseph Lamb, whose work is explored elsewhere on this website.

Gordon presided over an increase in borrowing in Sheffield from 711,000 books in 1921 to over 1.5 million in 1926. His friend Lamb wrote of him: ‘when he was in charge libraries became marvellously alive’.[vi]

[i] The script can be seen in the Sheffield Local History Library.

[ii] Obituary by J P Lamb, Library Association Record, November 1966, p.418.

[iii] Obituaries by E Hargreaves and A E Burbridge respectively, Library Association Record, November 1966, p.420.

[iv] The City Libraries of Sheffield, 1856-1956 (Sheffield, Libraries Galleries and Museums Committee, 1956).

[v] Open access, i.e. shelving accessible to the public, is almost universal today. In the early twentieth century, closed access, where books are chosen from catalogues and brought to borrowers by staff, was the norm.

[vi] From (ii) above.

The Twopenny Library: ‘A home without books is like a room without windows!’

Posted on April 24, 2017 by Val Hewson

Where did you go in Sheffield in the 1930s if you wanted an entertaining read? An Agatha Christie? Perhaps The Murder at the Vicarage with its unlikely detective, Miss Marple, or the more glamorous Murder on the Orient Express. Maybe one of Zane Grey’s Westerns? Wasn’t that one of his films at the Abbeydale Picture House?

With this in mind, you might well have headed to the ‘Novel’ Library. ‘A home without books is like a room without windows! May the ‘Novel’ Library let the sunlight into your house?’ and ‘A Book a day keeps the blues away’, said its newspaper adverts. It was one of the ‘twopenny libraries’, a commercial venture common in the 1930s. They specialised in popular fiction and got their name from the cost, 2d (about £1 today), of borrowing a book. The Sheffield branch was on the corner of the High Street and George Street. This was a good location, next to the prestigious Walsh’s department store, although on one occasion in September 1935 it led to trouble, when the library was invaded by cattle. (Yes, cattle. You can read about it here.)

The Corner of George St and High St, Sheffield – the site of the ‘Novel’ Library in the 1930s

Sheffield’s ‘Novel’ Library, one of around 25 branches across England, opened in 1934, supported by a campaign in local papers. The first advert appeared in the Daily Independent on the opening day, Saturday 10 February. ‘Something new in book lending’ was promised, with a flat fee of 2d per book per week and no deposit or subscription. Another ad appeared the next week, saying that 5,000 readers had joined on the first day[i] and announcing special opening hours – 8.30 am to 11 pm – to cope with the demand.

Later that week, the new library was mentioned in the Daily Independent’s ‘Mrs Vulcan’s shopping diary’, along with sale bargains such as ‘charming reading lamp shades in silk and parchment’ for only 3s 11½d (about £20 now) at Walsh’s. ‘Opening shortly. What is most needed in Sheffield,’ said another article, explaining that these words on a poster in the empty shop window had attracted much attention. There were already 8,000 books in stock, it went on, and the plan was for 15,000: ‘thrillers, love stories, biographies, serious works and every type of fiction’. The authors named were chosen no doubt for broad appeal: J B Priestley, Edgar Wallace, Ruby M Ayres and Warwick Deeping. All were well-known in the 1930s: Yorkshireman Priestley had local appeal and literary merit; thriller writer Wallace was one of the most popular authors in the world; Deeping’s novels dealt with serious themes like alcoholism; Ruby M Ayres was a prolific romantic novelist. None was highbrow or avant-garde.

The ‘Novel’ Library was set up by George Berthold ‘Bertie’ Samuelson (1889 – 1947). He had been a successful film director and producer, but ceased production for a time after being sued by an actor. According to his biographer, Gabriel A Sivan, Bertie Samuelson then ‘set up a number of “tuppence a week” lending libraries that ensured him a reasonable income for the next few years’.[ii]

The ‘Novel’ Library was not Sheffield’s only private library. There was a branch of Boot’s Booklovers’ Library and the local Red Circle Library had branches across the city. Reader Judith G remembers her mum using the Red Circle’s Moor branch in the late 1940s, borrowing books ‘written for somebody who didn’t want … you know, stir your brain kind of thing’.[iii] There were also smaller ventures, like Abbett’s Library run by Sir Norman Adsetts’ father alongside his sweetshop shop in Derbyshire Lane. W H Smith supplied his stock.

It was in this library, surrounded by delectably long runs of Nat Gould, Zane Grey and Ethel Boileau (a favourite of his mother’s), that the four year old Norman learned to read and to acquire his life-long passion for reading of every kind.

The economics of the twopenny library are interesting, as Reading Sheffield explored here. They cost the keen reader in depressed 1930s Britain much less than, say, the Boots libraries, which charged an annual subscription or a deposit and a borrowing fee.[iv] But why didn’t more people make use of the free public library? (Bertie Samuelson cheekily asked in one advert: ‘Why borrow a book at the free library for nothing when you can come to the ‘Novel’ Library and pay 2d?’) Sheffield, after all, had a new Central Library which opened the same year as the ‘Novel’ Library. In fact, more and more people were using it – the annual issue rose from 365,000 in 1925-26 to 3,640,000 in 1932-33. But for some it was perhaps too intimidating. Judith G remembered her mother:

‘ … for some reason she decided to join the [public] library, the big library in town … Because my mother was quite timid and I thought at first she wouldn’t be allowed in that one, you know, and then of course once she got there, there were more books than she could … and it was free as well.’

There were other factors in the popularity of twopenny libraries. They were apparently places where people socialised.[v] They dealt in ‘the kind of popular fiction insufficiently improving to pass muster on the shelves of the municipal libraries’. Graham Watson said (rather sniffily) in an article in The Spectator in 1935:

When the twopenny library first came on the scene it made an instantaneous appeal to an entirely new reading public – a public which was largely unable to afford either to buy books or to subscribe to the circulating libraries. It was a public which was largely State-educated, which had only just ‘discovered’ books, a public which wanted popular, very popular, fiction.

Public libraries had been founded, in 1850, to improve the working classes. Non-fiction, ‘books of information’ and great literature were their prescription. In 1927, Sheffield’s chief librarian, Richard J Gordon, said in a BBC talk: ‘[The central library] is not for readers who require only the latest popular novel, unless it should be the work of a novelist of admitted quality.’ By the early 1930s, the then City Librarian, Joseph Lamb, was experimenting in branch libraries. What people wanted, said Lamb, was ‘a book, preferably an attractive one’, which they generally chose ‘at random’. He deduced that ‘the provision of quantities of popular fiction [would attract] non-readers.’ He bought and promoted multiple copies of books by Edgar Wallace, Sapper, Ethel M Dell, Rafael Sabatini and others. He was right: issues increased by 300,000 over the year and borrowers by almost 12,000. (Compare this with the ‘Novel’ Library’s claim of 5,000 readers in a single day.)

The Novel Library chain folded in 1936. Bertie Samuelson was bankrupted by the enterprise early that year. He said in court that only two branches had failed and that the trouble had come when he had sold the business in good faith to someone who then defaulted, leaving him with liabilities of over £5,000 (about £248,000 now). In his best year, he said, the libraries made him £1,400 (about £70,000 now). The court suggested he had been unwise. The assets were sold and the bankruptcy discharged in November 1936.

Apart from the surviving 18^th and 19^th century subscription libraries (such as Newcastle’s Lit and Phil), private circulating libraries had died out by the 1960s. Today, as public libraries endure cuts and closures, perhaps the twopenny library will yet return in some form.

[i] This figure is not convincing when you learn that the same claim was made for the Leeds and Bradford branches in the Yorkshire Evening Post in November 1933; and that the ‘Novel’ Library claimed to have registered over 9,000 readers in a five week period in Eastbourne.

[ii] Gabriel A Sivan, George Berthold Samuelson (1889–1947): Britain’s Jewish film pioneer, Jewish Historical Studies, volume 44, 2012.

[iii] We would love to know more about the Red Circle libraries. Please leave a comment below if you have any information.

[iv] According to an advert from November 1933, the Hastings ‘Novel’ Library offered, ‘in response to countless requests, a season ticket for 10/6 (about £5) which allowed the holder to change books ‘as often as desired’.

[v] Robert James discusses this in Popular Culture and Working-Class Taste in Britain, 1930-39: A Round of Cheap Diversions? (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2010).

Sheffield’s eighteenth century library

Posted on January 2, 2017 by Val Hewson

By Loveday Herridge

As a teenager, the oldest of the Reading Sheffield interviewees, Ted L, borrowed books from the newly built ‘beautiful and spacious’ Central Library in Sheffield in the 1930s. The books there were housed very differently from their shelving in the filthy, cramped conditions of the Central Library’s predecessor, but the public book collection itself retained strong links with the past. For this collection had absorbed the local books of Sheffield’s Literary and Philosophical Society in 1932, when that important cultural organisation was wound up. And in turn, the Lit and Phil’s collection had been augmented in 1908 by a merger with the Sheffield Library.

This institution had been founded way back in 1771 when some of the members of the most influential families of Sheffield set it up. Its catalogues suggest that, while books were certainly lost, the collection simply grew ever larger over time, with books first purchased in the 1770s remaining available for borrowing. In my imagination, then, in 1934 Ted L borrows a book from the pristine Central Library which was actually purchased in 1771!

The Sheffield Library was a library financed through the subscriptions and annual fees of its members (who needed to be quite affluent to afford them), and open only to them. Sheffield’s subscription library was one of England’s earliest such institutions. It was conceived ‘on the plan of one formed a short time before at Leeds’. This Leeds library had been founded in 1768 by the rational dissenter and natural philosopher Joseph Priestley. Priestley had visited Sheffield where he had been an unsuccessful candidate in 1758 for a post as minister at Sheffield’s important dissenting Upper Chapel, and was a friend of the man appointed at the Chapel in his place – John Dickinson. Dickinson, apparently following his friend’s lead in promoting libraries as a way of improving minds, was a founder member and Sheffield’s Library President in its first year (1771), and in three subsequent years.

Upper Chapel, Sheffield (shared under GNU Free Documentation License)

The Rules for the Sheffield Library are to be found in the 1791 catalogue. They indicate that the Library was run very democratically:

annual meetings of members chose the committee of five members and a President
this committee, which organised the buying and selling of books, met monthly, and any other member could attend and vote, with two thirds of the members determining the choice of books
a librarian, who kept the catalogue and issued books, was chosen at the annual meeting.

Therefore the route by which books entered the Library suggests that the catalogue reflects quite closely the reading tastes and aspirations of its membership – just as the catalogue of the city libraries does now.

Did our Reading Sheffield interviewees pick books from the Central Library shelves that had first been purchased in the late eighteenth century by the members of the Sheffield Library, who were from influential merchant, manufacturing and professional families?

Imagining this scenario, I asked a twenty-first century Sheffield librarian whether she thought it was possible. The answer was that twentieth-century standards of cleanliness would of course have consigned those ancient books to the dustbin. But while the books themselves could not provide a physical link between those cultured men and women who set up the 1771 library and Reading Sheffield’s bookworm twentieth-century readers, what does connect them is surely the thread of curiosity and personal pleasure in books.

Wartime: Barrage Balloons and the Library

Posted on November 26, 2016 by Val Hewson

Books for Balloon Barrage Men (Telegraph and Independent, Thursday 14 September 1939)

Sir. – At various points in and around the city the men who man the balloon barrage are working in small groups. Their hours of duty are long, and their means of recreation limited. The YMCA are providing games and other amenities, and I have been asked to help to arrange a supply of suitable books for them.

There must be many readers in Sheffield who would be willing to give books from their private libraries, and I should be very glad to receive them at the Central Library, the Libraries Committee having kindly given permission for books to be received, selected and issued there. Light reading is most likely to be welcomed, and there should be a ready use for fiction, plays, travel, belles-lettres and similar types.

May I appeal to all who have suitable books to spare to send them to the Central Library for this purpose?

Yours etc

J P LAMB

City Librarian

This letter from City Librarian Joseph Lamb, dated just a few days after the start of World War II and repeated in the Star, was probably the first of Sheffield’s wartime book drives. That such an appeal should be issued so soon after the declaration of war suggests preparedness and foresight.

Air-raid defences, including barrage balloons, were being put in place around the UK during the late 1930s. Sheffield had around 70 of the huge balloons. They aimed to interfere with an aeroplane’s flight path and efforts to drop bombs. They might even bring it down by catching it in the cables which secured them to winches on lorries. The balloons were managed by crews who, day and night, manoeuvred them into place and raised and lowered them to protect suspected targets. Wind and rain made the job more difficult. The crews were often housed in schools and other public buildings, and their lives must have been a mixture of hard work, boredom and tension.

Hence the need for books and games for relaxation and diversion. J P Lamb asked for ‘light reading … fiction, plays, travel, belles-lettres and similar types’. This was a change from the usual calls of librarians of the period for their borrowers to read serious books. (In fact, Joseph Lamb did not scorn light reading, stocking popular books ‘in the belief that having attracted novel readers … [libraries] are given the opportunity of leading them to better reading, or at least to informative books’. He was criticised for this by other librarians. Furthermore, in the lead-up to war, books which explained the international situation had been in demand from the library.)

Unfortunately, there are no records of how people responded to the appeal. How many books were donated? What were they? The success of two book drives in 1943 and 1944, when over a million books were collected, suggests that this early appeal was probably successful. And we do know that when crews moved on, they often left behind games and books for their successors; and that by October 1939 there was a library service for troops stationed in Sheffield.

In September 1939, the war was for newspapers the only story in town, and they were unsurprisingly patriotic and positive. J P Lamb’s letter shared space with:

‘Why Germany Has Invaded Poland’, a long article by Count Sforza, former Italian Foreign Minister
a leader, ‘Nazis’ Rage’, doubting the German war effort and mentioning the plight of Jews ‘treated … with such devilish inhumanity’
reviews of a book about British naval history and essays by historian Lewis Namier who was a Polish Jew by birth
discussion of blackout regulations and lighting restrictions as the long nights drew in.

But it was not all serious. There was a column by the Rambling Naturalist and, by popular demand, a crossword (puzzles had been dropped to make way for war news).

Sheffield’s other main paper, the Star, was much the same: a leader entitled ‘Hitler’s War on Women’, an article by Beverley Baxter MP asking ‘Have German Plans Miscarried?’; and – lighter in tone – a snippet that research by Sheffield metallurgist Robert Hadfield had helped produce the newly essential tin hat.

Lamb’s letter was also an early indicator of his library’s important role in the wartime life of the city, for example, in public information and assistance services. But this story is for another post.

Here are the pages from the Telegraph and Star.

14091939-barrage-balloons-daily-tel

14091939-barrage-balloons-star

Librarians: ‘minds like detectives’

Posted on November 12, 2016 by Val Hewson

In this article from the Sheffield Telegraph and Daily Independent of 12 April 1939, an anonymous reporter challenges Sheffield’s professional librarians to answer some obscure questions – and loses comprehensively. There is no proof but experience suggests that the idea came from the City Librarian, J P Lamb, who had an eye for publicity for his library service.

Of course, today Google will yield answers in a minute, although there seems to be uncertainty about Rock Day and its information on matildite is hard for the non-specialist to understand. But consider what information professional Ned Potter suggests here – that Google and librarians don’t do the same things and there’s a place for both.

NOTHING TOO MUCH FOR SHEFFIELD’S LIBRARY SLEUTHS

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours trying to catch out a body of Sheffield people with minds like detectives – people who can trace anything, writes a “Telegraph and Independent” reporter.

You may find them in the reference departments of Sheffield Central Library.

Go and ask them anything, and they’ll tell you the answer. I think they’d even find out the numbers of the proverbial sands of the seashore, if anyone really wanted to know.

Carving from the Central Library entrance

I had heard all about the efficiency of Sheffield librarians in answering the most out-of-the-way queries, and I decided – rather heartlessly, you may think – to give them an unofficial test.

Cunning Questions

So I armed myself with a list of varied and abstruse questions, cunningly designed to foil each one of the 75,000 reference books at the disposal of the detectives.

“If they answer two they’ll be lucky,” I thought, “and they won’t answer two so very quickly.”

So I went into the Reference Library with a sly smile and approached the desk set aside for enquiries.

“Can you tell me,” I said, the sly smile broadening, “who swayed about upon a horse and thought it was Pegasus?”

The gentleman to whom the question was addressed did not look at me as if I were a madman. He was interested. Here was an opportunity for a spot of really good Sherlock Holmes stuff.

This is how he tracked the quotation down.

Pegasus was mentioned in a Greek legend. Right. Lempriere’s Classical Dictionary. He gets the dictionary, turns up Pegasus. No luck.

Carving from the Central Library entrance

Hot on the Scent

It might refer to some incident in a book. So Brewer’s “Reader’s Handbook,” Baker’s “Guide to the Best Fiction” and other books of reference are consulted. Still no clue.

Then various concordances are tried. In Keats’s concordance are found the words: “And thought it was Pegasus.” Hot on the scent now.

Keats’ “Sleep and Poetry” is turned up. In it is the passage:

with a puling infant’s force

They swayed about upon a horse

And thought it was Pegasus.

From the context the reference was obviously to eighteenth century poets, and one of my most deadly questions had gone down the drain – all in a quarter of an hour.

“Rock Day” and Why

Badly shaken, I returned to the attack with “When is Rock Day, and how did it get its name?”

My hopes rose. I began to think I had won this time. An examination of encyclopaedias, dictionaries, indexes to names, calendars, and even Chambers’s “Book of Days” revealed nothing.

Then they tried a dictionary of archaic words. A long shot, but it came off. It was found that “rock,” besides its usual meaning, was formerly a synonym for spinning wheel.

Spinning wheel? Distaff. Distaff Day?

And under Distaff Day in Smith’s Encyclopaedia of names was the following entry:-

Distaff Day. 7^th of January, so called because on that day the women who have the Christmas festival till Twelfth Day (the 6^th) return to their distaffs or ordinary work. As a distaff is also called a rock it is likewise called “Rock Day.”

“Very good,” I admitted. “But I haven’t nearly finished with you yet. What is the correct word to describe a government of old men?”

Carving from the Central Library entrance

Gerontocracy

My heart secretly rejoiced when Roget’s Thesaurus afforded no help, but I was foiled again by the best bit of detective work of the whole day.

Democracy, aristocracy, theocracy are all derived from Greek roots, the officials argued. Therefore it was likely that the word required, being of kindred meaning, would be formed in the same way.

So a Greek dictionary was consulted for the word “old man.” This was “geron.” Then a reference to the Oxford Dictionary brought to light the word “gerontocracy,” which had the required meaning.

I went into the Science and Technology Library to recover….

It was just the same in appearance – neat rows of books, spaciously designed, a counter for inquiries, assistants ready to go to any trouble to help you.

Carving from the Central Library entrance

Trump Card

Here I wanted to know what matildite was.

Reference to chemical dictionaries, technical encyclopaedias and general chemical texts supplied no information, but the construction of the word – ending in “ite” – suggested the possibility of its being a mineral, and reference to Dana’s “System of Mineralogy” substantiated this, giving analysis, occurrence and other details.

So I returned to the Reference Library (where they must hate the sight of me, by the way) to play my trump card.

“What place in Wales has the longest name?” I asked leering hideously.

But it was no use. True, guide books of Wales failed to give any information on that point, but Walsh’s “Handy Book of Curious Information” did.

The answer is Llanfairpwllgynggyllgogerpwllllandypilwgogo. (All right, there’s no need to laugh.)

“And how do you pronounce it?” I said.

They told me.

I went away a beaten man.

Experience Counts

But in all seriousness, Sheffield reference libraries are as efficient as it is possible for reference libraries to be. The fact that the officials found answers to questions as unusual as I set them proves that.

A wealth of record books is there, but it is only through the skill of an expert staff that they are able to give up their information; in the same way as the most magnificent of motor-cars cannot give the best results unless it is driven by a man who knows it inside out.

The libraries’ staff do not rely on catalogues to any great extent. Their experience has equipped them to go to the right reference books without any trouble.

“The best catalogue is an intelligent staff and a gradual building up of a unique knowledge of books,” Mr. J. P. Lamb, Sheffield’s Chief Librarian, told me.

It is to his credit that he has gathered around him such a staff, and sources of information which could supply the greatest scholar in the land with the answer to any question he cared to put.

Librarians’ Voices: Maureen A: ‘Like a large family’

Posted on November 5, 2016 by Val Hewson

Maureen worked in Sheffield Libraries between 1967 and 1997. She remembers the fun she and her colleagues had.

We really were like a large family, with all the problems that families have but in the knowledge that we’d got support from colleagues when we needed it.

Maureen’s first experience of the public library was in the Ecclesall branch, then located in a grand Victorian house bought by the city and converted.

It was a pleasant place to work, and power cuts made life interesting on winter nights, with lamps at each end of the counter, and eager borrowers hunting for their books with torches. I’m ashamed to say that the staff took great delight in embarrassing those readers who wanted a particular title. We would call through to the office, saying that Mr So-and-so would like to borrow this title, and make sure that the whole library could hear! Saturday afternoons were busy, and livened up by blokes rolling in from the Prince of Wales pub just across the road.

The Central Lending Library in Surrey Street was very different.

This was quite an eye opener, as it was vast, with an equally vast Browne charge.⁽¹⁾ I often wondered how many miles we covered simply shelving books.

On my first evening duty a woman brought in a beautiful fox cub, but it leapt out of her arms and disappeared around the bookshelves. It obviously hadn’t received obedience training!

This was before computerisation, and Maureen remembers the changeover from paper, which was successful ‘due to the tenacity of the Lending Librarian and his deputy’.

Every pink catalogue card had to be checked, and by the end of the day all the staff were seeing everything in green.⁽²⁾ There was near hysteria when word came from on high that all the book cards were to be thrown into bins, and five minutes later that they were to be kept!

In 1975 Maureen moved to the Sheffield Interchange Organisation (SINTO), a partnership between the library service and industry. One of her jobs was to organise the SINTO AGM, to be held in the Graves Art Gallery and chaired by the redoubtable Councillor Enid Hattersley.

[In the gallery] there was the famous picture of some 50 naked women stuffed into a phone box.⁽³⁾ Councillor Mrs Hattersley … was standing right in front of this picture with her drink, when a press photographer arrived, and Mrs. Hattersley, always ready for a picture, smiled. And click!

Occasionally Maureen had to ‘descend into the depths’. This was the library stack or basement store, with six miles of shelving – or was it twelve? Maureen wonders. It stretched across the whole site and housed ‘a vast amount of technical journals, standards, patents, EEC documents, as well as an overflow of lending material’. It could be spooky at night.

One dark night I went down for something, and nearly had a heart attack, because someone with a hideous face and long fair hair appeared, leaning against a wall. I got out fast! It turned out to be a prop from the production in the Library Theatre.

The ‘stack ladies lived a troglodyte existence’. They looked after the strongroom where the most important materials were kept. If the Local History librarians upstairs asked for something from there, this was quite a job. The stack lady had to be:

‘strong enough to open the door. You would think that there were gold bars in the place, and the books themselves could be very large and very heavy and the book lift up to Local Studies wasn’t exactly close.

Maureen remembers many Christmas celebrations.

[We had a meal] at the Norfolk Arms at Ringinglow, on one very snowy night. It was decided that a cabaret would cheer up the festivities, so four of the male staff dressed in ballet tutu skirts and walking boots and performed the Dance of the Little Swans from Swan Lake. It was so funny that all the bar staff rushed in followed by umpteen customers, and the whole place was heaving with laughter.

The highlight of the year was the panto, ‘very well organised’ by various colleagues. Maureen did the music.

Peter Pan was the first, followed by Aladdin, Robin Hood and then Snow White. Someone sang the very deep bass priest’s song from the Magic Flute, and I played a piano version of George Formby’s When I’m Cleaning Windows. From the sublime to the ridiculous.

⁽¹⁾ The usual borrowing system before computers. The library assistant would take the record card from the book and file it with the borrower’s ticket in long trays, in date order, until the book was returned. Here is a photo.

⁽²⁾ Looking at one colour (pink in this case) for a long time makes you see the complementary colour (which is green).

⁽³⁾ Sadly, we’ve been unable to trace this interesting painting.

Plus ça change: the British and foreign languages

Posted on October 19, 2016 by Val Hewson

In 2013 a survey for the British Council found that three out of four adults in the UK could not have a conversation in Spanish, French or other foreign language. There were calls for more language teaching in schools and colleges. Our inability to speak other languages and our apparent reluctance to try have serious economic and cultural consequences, said the British Council. Businesses miss trading opportunities, and we all miss chances to experience other cultures.

Plus ça change, you might (be unable to) say. The findings of the 2013 research are, sadly, not new: there have been many such reports over the years. Back in 1929, in their regular Books and Readers bulletin, Sheffield Libraries discussed a report of the time.

Education for Salesmanship. The charge has often been made that the British manufacturer is steadily losing his grip on foreign markets, and we wish to draw attention here to “The Interim Report of the Committee on Education for Salesmanship – British Marketing Overseas,” which has just been added to the Commercial and Technical Department. … It has been formulated by a Committee of some thirty leading business authorities and its suggestions are worthy of deep consideration.

Deficient Knowledge of Foreign Languages. This was a subject of very special inquiry by the Committee, and they report that “we agree with one witness in thinking that in view of the increasing severity of foreign competition, alike as regards trading and technical skill, the acquisition of foreign languages has long passed the luxury or drawing room stage, and their study will determine to some extent the future measure of British overseas trade prosperity.”

The report goes on to stress the importance of having catalogues and prices compiled for foreign markets in the language of the country to be traded with and in terms of the weights and measures in local use. … Yet a large number of British Firms attempting to do, or actually doing business … display a strange insistence on writing to their customers in English.”

The final summing up of the Report, as follows, is particularly challenging. “If we were asked what our evidence shows to be, broadly speaking, the outstanding weakness in British marketing overseas, we should answer:- A detached and insular attitude and unscientific practice – relics of the time, long past, when we enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the world’s markets for manufactured goods.”

The article in Books and Readers goes on to ‘draw the attention of the people of Sheffield to [the library’s] comprehensive selection of books on modern marketing methods, salesmanship, advertising, etc…’

Help available for learning languages is also described.

Language Talks, at Hillsborough and Walkley Branches. As regards the need for better language training may we also point out that all the City Libraries stock good books on the major languages, especially from the commercial angle, and in the Central Lending Library there are in addition continually growing collections of reading matter in French, German, Italian and Spanish.

Learning the written languages, however, is only half the battle and the need for actual training in the spoken language needs to be met. There are two active mechanical agencies in this work: the gramophone and the wireless.

A early Philips wireless from 1931. Were the Sheffield Libraries’ models something like this? (Creative Commons licence)

The Library does not yet stock gramophone records, but it is making an attempt by means of wireless to help students to attain a knowledge of French, German and Spanish as spoken and written to-day. The Walkley and Hillsborough Libraries have special rooms set aside for Wireless Discussion purpose*, and these rooms are available to language students on the evenings when language talks are broadcast. The set is a three-valve Philip’s [sic] All-Mains, and the tone of the loud-speaker is particularly good. For the information of students we give the [BBC] programme for the next three months:

Walkley	Mondays (2LO#)	7.25-7.45 p.m.
	French by M.E.M. Stéphan	Jan. 27^th; Feb. 10^th; 24^th; March 10^th; 24^th; April 7^th.
	Spanish by Dr. A. R. Pastor	Jan. 20^th; Feb. 3^rd; 17^th; March 3^rd; 17^th; 31^st.
Hillsborough	Wednesdays (5GB#)	8.0 – 8.30 p.m.
	German Language Talks by Mr. O. Siepmann.	Weekly, January 22^nd to April 9^th

* Wireless Discussion Groups were a BBC initiative of the 1920s and 1930s. Libraries welcomed groups of people to listen to one or more set programmes and to discuss them afterwards.

# 2LO was a BBC London station in the 1920s. 5GB, based at Daventry, became the BBC’s National Programme from the late 1920s.

Librarians’ Voices: Barbara Sorby: ‘Gosh…where to start?’

Posted on October 9, 2016 by Val Hewson

Barbara Sorby worked in Sheffield Libraries for about 40 years, starting and finishing her career at the Manor Library in the east of the city. Manor also happened to be the library she belonged to as a child and growing up. It opened in 1953 (it was supposed to be 1938 but World War II and its aftermath got in the way). It was the country’s first modular library: that is, the interior walls were kept to a minimum to allow maximum flexibility in use. More than sixty years later, Manor Library shows its age a little but remains a harmony of light and space.

Manor Library today

‘Gosh …where to start?’ she says. With a scent…

My enduring memory of Manor is of my first day there, which was actually my very first working day. I had used Manor since the age of 8, and year on year the foyer was filled with beautiful flowers and plantings from the Parks Dept. On my first day in January 1963 the foyer was full of hyacinths, and the smell of them is so evocative, every year I return to Manor in thoughts as I smell those flowers, wherever I am.

But Barbara might have taken against Sheffield Libraries forever…

At the age of eight, I and three friends from Charnock Hall School went to join the library, following a ‘marketing’ visit to the school by the then children’s librarian. Unfortunately she had omitted to tell us that, if we were from ‘over the Derbyshire border’ (which then split Gleadless Townend in two at Ridgeway Road), we would have to pay to be members. At five shillings per person [about £6 today] we were appalled…one small boy declaring that we had come to borrow books, not to buy the blooming library!!

Here and below, Manor Library in the 1950s, when Barbara would have first known it

And it might have all ended in disaster…

I once had my hair set alight by a firework thrown into the children’s library. And I was impressed to find that the perpetrator had been chased by another member of staff and brought down on the Ridgeway Road zebra crossing with a zealous rugby tackle.

The days were full…

The library used to be frantically busy, with borrowers stalking staff who would be shelving huge piles of books…and trying to grab the Catherine Cooksons and Zane Greys. And it wasn’t always the men wanting the cowboy stories or the women wanting the romance!

I worked there for five very happy years…with the National Fiction Reserve Scheme as part of my job, acquiring every ‘fic’ title published in the UK by authors whose surnames began N-S.

These and many more books were stored in the Manor basement, and we had great fun switching out the lights on colleagues working down there and setting the stacks rolling!

A day Barbara could not forget…

I remember being on the counter when a shocked borrower came in to tell us that President Kennedy had been shot. They say you always remember where you were at that time.

Four decades later…

I finished my career at Manor too…four decades later! I was Area Librarian for South East Sheffield and based at Manor. It wasn’t half as much fun then…nor a fraction as busy!

“The Fifth Floor to Heaven” (28 December 1939)

Posted on September 11, 2016 by Val Hewson

In the 1930s, Sheffield’s libraries were being reformed and developed, and the numbers of borrowers and books issued were both rising. One strategy to promote the library service seems to have been to seek coverage in local newspapers. Here is an example of this – an odd little anecdote in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph of 28 December 1939. Odd because it seems incomplete without the name of the teacher or details of the books she wanted and why these were unobtainable locally (there were established library services in Manitoba at the time). Today, when the story might at most have merited a tweet, we would have had a photo and a quote from her, but no doubt transatlantic communications three months into the Second World War were restricted. At this remove, we will likely never know who she was or whether she ever returned to Sheffield. At all events, the fact of this slight story appearing in the paper suggests the good links between the library and local media.

“The Fifth Floor to Heaven”

City Library Praised

Sheffield has just had a remarkable tribute to the efficiency of its library service.

A Sheffield girl who is teaching in a small town in Manitoba, Canada, required books of reference for a lecture she was preparing.

Being unable to get the books in the district and not knowing of any place near at hand where she could get them, she wrote to the Sheffield City Librarian (Mr J P Lamb) asking him to send books and offered to pay postage both ways.

In her letter she described the Sheffield Library as “the fifth floor to heaven”.

As it is scarcely possible to send books from Sheffield to Canada in this way, Mr Lamb has referred the request to the Chief Librarian of Toronto, suggesting that some regional library organisation in Canada might be able to supply the demand.