Libraries and Minorities

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 401, 28 February 1947, Page 5

Libraries and Minorities

NE of the points made by () Lionel McColvin in an interview in last week’s issue was the importance of libraries to minorities. A democracy in which minorities have no influence is of course not a democracy at all; but the technical, problems involved in feeding minorities mentally involve usually a heavier outlay in material and money than minorities can afford. It is not easy for a minority to own a newspaper, for example, or if they do by some chance own.it, to run it with a reasonable hope of success. Nor can. minorities usually own broadcasting stations. But a minority of one can read and re-read a book. Books in fact yield their lessons best when they are so used. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that they resist majority use-passively if not actively. Although they are produced in thousands they circulate singly, since they have usually only one reader at a time. If a newspaper has 50,000 subscribers something like 200,000 people will read it every day (a large proportion of them at the same moment). But it has’ never happened in New Zealand that 200,000 people have looked at the same book on the same day; or a quarter, or a tenth of that number. It rarely happens, on the other hand, that a broadcast programme ‘has an audience numbering less than thousands tuned in to it at the same time. Radio and newspapers speak to thousands simultaneously or don’t speak at all. Books are the still small voice that the poorest and obscurest solitary (where there are free libraries) can hear when he wants to hear it. They are the protectors of individuals and therefore the defenders of democracy itself, which can’t function without free and thought. It is also true of *course that they don’t grow on trees. The cheapest books to-day cost several shillings, the smallest public libraries hundreds and usually thousands of pounds. But even those are negligible costs when spread over the whole community-and spent to keep us free.