A passionate speech delivered by author Philip Pullman to two or three hundred people at an Oxfordshire library campaigners' meeting earlier this month has become a viral sensation through the influence of social networking.
The speech, posted online and read some 20,000 times in two days, has been tweeted and retweeted, and hailed as a classic piece of oratory. It has already been translated into French, with the heading "Laissez nos bibliothèques en paix!" Novelist Joanne Harris (@joannechocolat) called Pullman "awesome", asking "Can we make him Minister for Education please?", while actor Samuel West (@exitthelemming) said he had made "One of the great speeches". Many ordinary tweeters echoed their sentiments, with a comment from @jamesswyer typical: "Wow. Philip Pullman's rallying cry to save libraries leaves a lump in the throat," he wrote.
Pullman was roused to the scorching critique by Oxfordshire county council's plans to stop funding nearly half of its 43 libraries, and instead hand them over to be run by community volunteers. The novelist compared the current cutbacks to the laying waste of the great Library of Alexandria in the 4th century, reserving particular scorn for the idea of volunteer-run libraries, which he called "patronising nonsense".
"Does he think the job of a librarian is so simple, so empty of content, that anyone can step up and do it for a thank-you and a cup of tea?," Pullman asked. "Does he think that all a librarian does is to tidy the shelves? And who are these volunteers? Who are these people whose lives are so empty, whose time spreads out in front of them like the limitless steppes of central Asia, who have no families to look after, no jobs to do, no responsibilities of any sort, and yet are so wealthy that they can commit hours of their time every week to working for nothing? Who are these volunteers? Do you know anyone who could volunteer their time in this way?"
The writer of the acclaimed His Dark Materials trilogy also derided the council's proposal that different community groups should bid for money from a central pot to fund their library ventures, saying with dripping contempt, "We must sit up and beg for it, like little dogs, and wag our tails when we get a bit", and claiming it would set communities against each other. "Market fundamentalism" would "kill off every humane, life-enhancing, generous, imaginative and decent corner of our public life", he said.
Pullman also made a powerful sideswipe at publishers, saying they had also been infected by the "market madness" and were now run by money people.
"The greedy ghost whispers into their ears: Why are you publishing that man? He doesn't sell enough. Stop publishing him," Pullman said. "Look at this list of last year's books: over half of them weren't bestsellers. This year you must only publish bestsellers ... So decisions are made for the wrong reasons. The human joy and pleasure goes out of it; books are published not because they're good books but because they're just like the books that are in the bestseller lists now, because the only measure is profit."
The mass sharing of Pullman's rousing speech online comes as the number of public libraries threatened with closure tops 400, according to the Public Libraries News site.
Hardest hit is the Isle of Wight, where nine of 11 libraries are proposed to go. But a groundswell of support is growing behind what is being called "Save Our Libraries Day", 5 February, with "read-in" events being held at local branches, and members of the public urged to join or visit their library, and take out their full allowance of books. Authors have stepped up en masse to support libraries, with romantic novelist Katie Fforde and Gruffalo creator Julia Donaldson among the latest stellar names to speak out.
But culture minister Ed Vaizey caused anger this week by commenting at a Westminster Hall debate on libraries that the "death of the public library service has been greatly exaggerated".
