Tots to Teens, Star Mag
16th July 2006
Good books binned?
I RECENTLY “met” someone (I’ll call her Choo) from my old hometown Batu Pahat, Johore. That is, we exchanged emails when I had to interview her for an article I was writing. In one of her answers, Choo mentioned that she was an ex-pupil of the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus (CHIJ) in BP.
The interview was about reading and she talked about how while CHIJ had no actual library; each classroom had a book cupboard. She recalled borrowing beautifully illustrated books on Greek mythology and an unforgettable encounter with Rumer Godden’s The Doll’s House.
I was the head librarian. A teacher told me I was deemed too bossy and stuck-up to be head girl, so I was put in charge of the library. Well, that suited me fine. Librarians could borrow four books a week instead of two and I took full advantage of this privilege.
I wonder if the library is still in the same spot, on the first floor of the block that faced the playing fields, positioned directly above the teachers’ common room. I loved spending afternoons after school there, tidying the shelves, getting lost between the covers of old favourites and discovering new delights.
I remember rummaging through the lower shelves of one of the bookcases one afternoon and noticing a fat hardback with a cream cover. The title on the spine caught my eye: My Family and Other Animals. I thought I’d made a mistake. Other animals?! What must the family itself be like?
Of course, this was Gerald Durrell’s classic about his life, as a boy, with his eccentric family in the Greek island of Corfu. I borrowed the book that afternoon, read it and fell in love. I think I must have taken it out a dozen times before I left school.
The book remains one of my all-time favourites and I wonder if it still lives in the CHIJ library or if it has been replaced, and with what? Choo told me about how many beautiful old books at the school where she now teaches were sold to the rag-and-bone man when the library was given a facelift. I suspect the same fate might have befallen the old books at CHIJ.
It makes my heart ache to think of the waste. I know it doesn’t only happen in Malaysia. Libraries the world over have to replace old volumes with new ones. If books are falling apart at the seams or riddled with silverfish and other pests that will infect healthy books, they really have to go. But it makes me want to cry to think of books that are in perfectly good condition being pulped.
I have a friend who works in a public library in England and she says that when shelf space becomes a problem, they hold jumble sales of less popular titles to raise funds for the library. However, books are often thrown away if there’s not enough time or manpower to do the sorting and selling.
Choo rescued a few books from her school library’s discard pile. She says the books have been replaced with authors she’s never heard of. I wonder if, all around Malaysia, good books are being trashed.
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