A comparative review essay focussing on three recent publications about libraries, their histories and futures. Featuring: Alistair Black's Libraries of Light: British Public Library Design in the Long 1960s (Routledge, 2017); Alice Crawford (ed.), The Meaning of the Library: A Cultural History (Princeton, 2015); and Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin (eds.), Fantasies of the Library (MIT, 2016).
From the essay: "For [public] libraries to grow positively and not just expand hollowly, in their transition from “secular temples” to “information warehouses,” they need Billington’s dreamers and Springer and Turpin’s fantasists as much as they need Crawford’s specialists. One of the most urgent things both of those parties need to do in collaboration is to develop solidarities with those vulnerable and devoted practitioners on the frontline, the librarians, in their collective struggle away from the weak vision of community servicing set in motion by the 1970s and the organizational rationales such a model helplessly perpetuates."
