It’s National Libraries Week and I’m late to the party. But I’ve never stopped shouting about libraries and all who sail in them. As Chair (for a few more weeks only!) of CWIG, the Society of Authors’ Children’s Writers and Illustrators Group, I’ve spent a lot of time talking and thinking about public and school libraries over the last few years. And CWIG has a fab new plan about to start to support school libraries. Watch this space!

But this is about public libraries. Easy targets for funding cuts by ignorant people, poorly understood by too many people who should know better, and yet still doing a fantastic job in the face of austerity.

Libraries create readers. Is there any adult book-lover out there who didn’t come to be so through the use of a free public library as a child? Who is so rich that they can afford to buy the number of books an emerging reader needs to feed the hunger? And who becomes an expert reader through a restricted diet of rationed books? Children don’t become readers without being deluged by books, without being able to pick the ones they like the look of and discard them if they find they don’t enjoy them and would rather choose a different one. Children need to practise for hundreds and ultimately thousands of hours and they won’t do it if they don’t enjoy it. Librarians know that. Librarians curate pleasure and pleasure becomes expertise.

We need free public libraries, properly funded and properly staffed and with opening hours that suit the people who will use them. We need energetic, trained librarians who have the energy to foster an environment which attracts people of all ages and all backgrounds and all needs.

“But why do we need libraries when we have the internet?” Because the Internet provides facts at our fingertips but books give true understanding. Because the Internet is endlessly fun and distracting, feeding our curious minds brilliantly, but books are engaging and provide a personal deep-minded experience. Because the Internet is predominantly non-fiction and because we need fiction, too. Because the Internet cannot teach a child to read. Because the Internet cannot be relied on unless readers already have critical reading skills. Because the Internet is unedited and amorphous. Because the Internet doesn’t engage the sense of touch and smell and the feeling of ownership that holding a book does. Because the Internet bombards us with stuff, good and bad, but books are things in which we invest choice and to which we devote some hours and the intellectual and emotional exercise of doing that means something.

We need the Internet AND books. We need libraries AND bookshops. We need it all and we need free choice.

Please support libraries. I’m going to mine TODAY!

What do libraries mean to you? Your family? What did they give you?