The Council of the Royal Society of Literature has asked me to make a brief submission about the importance to literature of British public libraries, and the consequent necessity for injecting a substantial amount of money into the public library system.

  The Society represents literature, in other words the best and most truthful writing, and we are not part of the book business. Thus we have a different set of priorities to those of publishers and booksellers, whose agenda must for obvious reasons be dictated partly by the need to make money. If literature is to be kept alive, we must make sure that the best writing is available to the maximum number of readers, whatever their income or purchasing power. It must be available to the young, so that the next generation of writers will have good models on which to base their own creativity and their own innovations. Libraries are still the main site where this process of handing over, of tradition in the best sense, goes on.

  The buyers at public libraries still base some of their judgements on other criteria than sheer selling power. They look for good books, books that will last, which may not be the same books as the ones with which publishers are flooding the bookshops (most obviously in the case of celebrity biographies.) There is a trend within book-shops to buy more copies of fewer books, from fewer, and bigger, publishers. This "centralising" effect is not good for literature, and public libraries, together with independent book-shops, remain our best hope of resisting this trend and keeping a wide selection of good books in front of a wide selection of readers.

  However, in order to do this, libraries need major investment. They are now being required to fulfil a range of other information- and entertainment-related needs as well as the supply of books, and their funds are very limited. In our view, the supply of a wide range of good books remains their prime function, and without investment it will be increasingly hard for them to fulfil it. When money is short for libraries and the appetite of the public for new books great, the area of book-buying which tends to be neglected is the replacement of battered or stolen library copies of well-liked backlist books, in other words books that have not been published in the current publishing year. These books, not necessarily available on the shelf in book-shops although still in print, may thus inadvertently disappear from library shelves as well. Yet Public Lending Right data regularly proves to us that such books are regularly borrowed and enjoyed by the public.

  It is our submission that if this is allowed to happen, a whole generation of potential readers and writers will be short-changed. Under a Labour government that has committed itself to widening access to education and to culture, this is an area that cannot logically be ignored. We still have excellent, imaginative librarians and some equally good libraries, but they cannot maintain their standards without vastly improved funding. It would be a disaster for a nation with as great a literary heritage as ours if the availability of literature were allowed to decline any further.

10 November 2004