Keith Manley of the Institute of Historical Research spoke to the first CILIP in London meeting of the new year at the Sekforde Arms on twopenny libraries. flourishing from the 1920s to 1950s, these private, circulating libraries in small premises, these charged twopence (c 0.84p in decimal money) for the loan of popular fiction and spread widely, since they filled a need that publicly funded libraries were reluctant to meet. They were not popular with the book trade, with the more established circulating libraries, such as Boot's, Mudie's and W. H Smith's, nor with the library profession, who, as J.D Stewart of Bermondsey Libraries put it, felt they merely gave people a 'daily dose of imaginative dope,'. or sniffily pronounced that they catered for those who read for amusement only. The fearsome Queenie Leavis attacked them as 'twopenny dram shops' and Orwell satirised them in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, for example the woman client who asks for salacious romances by requesting something 'modern but not deep'
Keith based much of his talk on work he has done with Home Office papers, for in the mid-thirties on the reforms to the Shops Act of 1911, under which the hours of work of shop assistants were regulated. The twopenny libraries had claimed exemption from these provisions, on the grounds that they were not in the retail business, and shopkeepers resented what they saw as unfair competition by the long opening hours offered by the twopenny libraries. A key test case had been whether a man who ran a pitch on Skegness beach, at which he offered an entertainment known as slippery bears, was a shop keeper or an amusement caterer.
It was a fascinating paper, and inspired a number of questions form the audience. Many of us, like me, were old enough to have entered the profession when the 'fiction debate' was still live, the hard-fought issue of whether public libraries should stock popular fiction, or restrain themselves to works of literary merit. As did other in the audience, when I first used a public library, tickets were allocated for fiction or non-fiction, to try to make sure borrowers balanced their frivolous fiction reading with some serious non-fiction.
I offer the term 'amusement caterer' to Edinburgh Council, where they propose, in the face of staff and public opposition and considerable ridicule in the press and on library blogs, to rename library staff as 'audience development officers'.