Dear Libraries, this is why you matter

How many municipal buildings do you love?

Every society requires vast infrastructure to keep it operational, of which only a fraction is even open to the public, and much of it we only visit under duress – hospitals, job centres, courthouses. And among the rest, libraries stand apart from galleries, museums and archives, in one key aspect. From a library, we take home not just new ideas, experiences and memories, but something tangible, something valuable. And in exchange for nothing but the willingness to take a book into your care and the promise to return it, ready for the next person who shares your curiosity. As one visitor wrote in their love letter to the city's libraries: "I love that the idea of you is based on trust".

Handling these letters, each of them written with obvious passion, gratitude, and love, feels like being entrusted with something more precious than paperbacks. Many of them reveal something deeply personal, often deeply painful, about their pasts, when the presence of libraries proved crucial. Many of today's writers, teachers, scientists, researchers and, of course, librarians, were yesterday's kids, presented with a room full of possibilities, and trusted to follow wherever their curiosity led. How many municipal institutions can say likewise?

Other letter-writers reflect on a time when their local library acted as a sanctuary, away from home, or school, or work, where they could be welcomed into a space of calm. Just a table and a chair and the time to be alone with their thoughts or be carried away by their imaginations. The words 'haven', 'refuge', 'escape' appear over and over. For these letter-writers, the library was not just a pleasant diversion, a treat, or an added extra. It was an irreplaceable, invaluable necessity.

When I first moved to Scotland, I was completely unprepared for the winter. Growing up in Belfast, and studying in Yorkshire, I flattered myself as being 'of the north' and assumed the matter of a few degrees of latitude couldn't make a noticeable difference.

With almost twenty years' hindsight, I know, intellectually, I must have seen occasional daylight. Yet all my abiding memories of that first winter are painted in rich, thick darkness – wet, black pavements reflecting the streetlights, three-foot-wide puddles glowing gold, seagulls' huge white bodies stark against the starless sky, screaming from one tenement roof to the next.

In some ways this over-representation isn't any great mystery. Most of my daylight hours were in libraries. Deep in the stacks of the university library in George Square, or the Central Library on George IV Bridge, or across the road in the (initially rather intimidating) silence of the reading room at the National Library of Scotland.

As my pennies rapidly ran out, it was a part-time gig on the front desk of the Scottish Poetry Library that kept me solvent. Given my first flat had no functional central heating and Scandanavian speed metal enthusiasts for neighbours, it's maybe not that surprising that most of my time was spent with my head in a book, in one of the city's embarrassment of free, public riches. When I read the testimonies of 'Dear Library's letter-writers, talking of the opportunities libraries gave them to read, learn and explore without spending precious funds, I see more than a few echoes of my own early days in the city. I wouldn't be writing this article for you without them.

I'm far from the only writer to owe a debt of gratitude. Glasgow-based novelist Heather Parry told me how deeply her novels, rich with historical detail and imaginative flourish, depend on access to libraries. "Libraries are a trove of research materials I couldn't ever hope to afford myself," she explained, "and as a reader they're a way to take risks I mightn't take on books I had to buy." Parry's sentiments are echoed in many of the letters left in 'Dear Library'.

When money changes hands, readers tend to stick with the authors, genres and topics they already know, so that they can be fairly sure of a return on their investments. When there is no such obstacle, they read openly, widely, creatively, often finding new favourites and new fascinations in the process. More than a few noted that, growing up in council estates, or in homes where money was always tight, libraries were some of the few places they could rely on for entertainment and community, without being forced into impossible financial dilemmas.

It's worth remembering that free public libraries are, in many ways, a relatively recent innovation. In the eighteenth century, the role of lending books was served by commercial booksellers, who charged small but substantial fees. Or by wealthy private collectors, who allowed access to their holdings via annual subscriptions. Neither was particularly accessible to the general public. Things began to change in the late 1830s, when the Chartists, a popular workers' movement focused primarily in the north of England, levied their considerable collective power to demand better working and living conditions, and access to education.

North of the border, the 1853 Public Libraries Act (Scotland) and 1872 Education (Scotland) Act responded to similar pressures from labour organisers, making allowances for primary-level education and, in theory, access to books. The Libraries Act, however, proved only a half-measure, forcing early public libraries to rely on donations from the wealthy, and to charge annual subscriptions, which further hampered accessibility. By 1885, Westminster estimated only 8 per cent of Scottish people were served by a public library, despite literacy rates of over 90 per cent, well above average for the rest of Britain.

In Edinburgh, it took the intervention of Scottish-American steel magnate Andrew Carnegie in 1886 to finally compel the city council to open a public library, after Carnegie doubled his proposed donation for its construction to £50,000 (around £1.5m today). The council had opposed the idea for decades. The chosen site for the Central Library was on George IV Bridge, and as I sit in it today, typing this sentence, the reading room is filled with the light of the evening golden hour, and with people coming in after work for a moment's peace before heading home, or maybe before starting another shift. The tapping of keyboards on the public computers gives a peaceful background chatter, with the steady hum of traffic on the bridge outside rumbling away underneath it all.

Carnegie couldn't have predicted a fair amount of what Central Library provides today, from kids' art clubs to knit-and-natters. But the principles he passed down to the architects – that workers deserve beautiful things, that each of the Carnegie Libraries bear the motto "Let There Be Light" – are visible, from the vast space dedicated to its impressive holdings to the delicate detailing on the reading room's elegant domed roof.

Carnegie's legacy is complicated. He became one of the wealthiest men in history through exploitation of workers all over the world, and his philanthropy remained a sticking plaster for the generational poverty in which most of those workers lived. But without his efforts, the city's famously voracious readers would have remained greatly under-resourced for years to come. And, according to Historic Environment Scotland, the site of the National Library, established in 1925, was chosen in no small part because the Central Library was already next door.

The history-making decisions of industrialists and city councils often rest on cold numbers, and arguably Carnegie himself reaped the rewards from nurturing a literate, intellectually active workforce. But, reading these love letters to today's public libraries, what drives that love is so clearly something that cannot, and should not, be quantified or rationalised: the possibility of escape, of admission into worlds of imagination, or realities historically or geographically distant from our daily lives. The letter-writers to 'Dear Library' recount difficult childhoods in which the promise of a better or safer life, one surrounded by love and community, came primarily from between the pages of a book. One writer, heartbreakingly, places the word 'home' in inverted commas. The opportunity to access such a safe haven, even briefly, is worth so much more than what can be totted up in revenues and expenses.

Poet and artist Harry Josephine Giles harmonises with our letter-writers, remembering her early years in Orkney. "Libraries are the most precious and radical institutions I know," she told me. "A place where anyone can go to find out anything, for free? The public library kept me going all the way through childhood and adolescence; radical underground libraries widened my eyes as I grew into the world." A letter-writer echoes Giles' experiences: "knowledge should never be kept in a secret society," they argue, "it should always be shared, because wonder, magic, imagination – these are all things that are vital to the sustenance of life".

This is neither metaphor, nor exaggeration: libraries are, for many families, crucial tools for childcare. In Dundonald, the suburb of Belfast where I grew up, I was blessed with a public library not two minutes' walk from the gates of my primary school. My granny would take me there after she'd finished work at S.D. Bell's Café, and before the bowls started on BBC2. Thanks to some major refurbishment, Dundonald Library is still a comfy, airy, modern building, with high windows on all sides of the single reading room, to make best use of the light (the Dundonald of my memory is always cloudy, with thick, charcoal grey skies forever on the brink of rain). If they still carry 'Fantastic Mr Fox', there may still be records of how often it was in my hands, sitting on the playmats, or in my granny's living room waiting for my parents to finish work, getting an in-depth tactical lesson on how to bowl a good backhand.

A long-time library volunteer, Heather Parry also noted their value not just to young readers, but to elderly and disabled people, many of whom struggle to socialise, or have seen their friendship circles diminish. "I cannot overstate the value of libraries as a place of free community care," Parry said, "which allow their users to connect with both their neighbours and the wider world in a time when such essential spaces are being defunded out of existence."

This last point, crucially, is at the heart of the 'Dear Library' exhibition. In 2024, the BBC published a report that found over 180 council-run libraries had either been forced to close their doors due to budgetary cuts, or been kept alive solely by voluntary work in their communities, at the loss of over 2,000 paid jobs. In poorer areas, libraries were four times more likely to close, and almost a thousand libraries were forced to operate on reduced hours. One letter-writer described seeing their local library closing as "a terrible miss, like an old friend has passed away."

The letters left in 'Dear Library' celebrate the libraries that have survived, not least because they remain under existential threat. We know full well that without constant pressure, constant demand, constant organisation, what I, and countless other people besides, have enjoyed throughout our lives might be taken away from us. And none of us have Andrew Carnegie's billions to bring them back.

One of my favourite authors, herself an insatiably curious reader, is Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin spoke often and powerfully about the irreplaceability of libraries, but one passage stays with me. Back in 1997, when I was still very much in my Roald Dahl phase, she said:

"Plunging into the ocean of words, roaming in the broad fields of the mind, climbing the mountains of the imagination. That was my freedom, that was my joy. And it still is.

"That joy must not be sold. It must not be "privatised," made into another privilege for the privileged. A public library is a public trust.

"And that freedom must not be compromised. It must be available to all who need it – and that's everyone – when they need it – and that's always."

There are many words that appear over and over in these letters: love, community, imagination, free. But one phrase stands out. 'Dear Library' gave hundreds of readers the opportunity to say anything they wanted to the libraries that played, and still play, a crucial role in their lives, socially, intellectually, emotionally. Not just as places of learning, but of being. One of the few places left where one can spend time but not money with old friends, new friends, and even imaginary friends from fantastical lands. And what they wanted to say most of all, was 'thank you'.