Books (or the lack of) (2007)

Please, come in, sit yourself down and make yourself comfortable.

I’d like to tell you a little story.

Please wilfully suspend your disbelief and I will impart my tale to you.

Imagine, if you can, a small country, oh somewhere out in the tropics, you know the sort of place where bananas and coconuts grow and the sun sends small rivulets of sweat down the nape of your neck making you shiver ever so slightly.

Imagine further that reading was becoming quite a rarity in this small tropical country, so much so that this small country’s government was becoming quite concerned, concerned enough to mount literacy campaigns on a year by year basis.

Ok, are you with me so far? By the way are you sitting comfortably? Just shift yourself around for a little while if you need to, it’s ok. Would you care for a cushion? No! Ok!

Well, where was I, Oh yes!

Can you now stretch your imagination just a tad more, no, further than that, yes, that’s it just fantasise that this country had only one international author, and he had lived only in the country just a few years when he was young. Imagine that all the other international authors writing about this country came from outside, and some got it wrong, oh so wrong that this little country became angry and banned books by these international authors.

Book banning became very popular in this little banana and coconut country, so they started to ban books on a monthly basis even if the books they were banning had been allowed before. Some people say that the banning also spread to films, but maybe that would be too much for you to imagine.

Now in this little country there were libraries. No, not like the libraries that you and I are used to with rooms full of book shelves and book shelves full of books, these libraries were different.

In the libraries in this little banana and coconut country the rooms were huge, but the book shelves were few. The book shelves were few and the books were fewer. Many book shelves were empty, and those that were not empty had few books and those books were old and dusty. Of the old and dusty books, library users were only allowed to take some away to read – two books to each person with a special pass, and then only allowed to read them for two weeks. But the nice books, the books that some people wanted to read were not allowed out of the library.

If you were too young, or didn’t have the special pass you were not even allowed to have the two books that other people were permitted.

So, I hear you ask, what did people do to read? Well, listen closely and I will explain.

As only people who were old enough and had special passes were allowed to take the two old dusty books away to read, other people stopped reading or turned to book shops to buy the books that they thought they could afford.

Unfortunately people could not afford to buy all the books that they wanted to read, and they couldn’t borrow from the library because either the books were not there to borrow, or they did not have permission to borrow them, so the people went without.

Some people visited the big bookshops, but there were many books that were not on those shelves because those books were banned, and others were not there because they, sadly, were out of print.

Other people went to small dusty second hand bookshops, and rummaged around in the dust trying to find just the one useful book, but, as time went on there were less and less useful books available in the second hand book shops.

The government still encouraged people to read, but there was less and less to read, and so the people of the little banana and coconut country fell behind other peoples in the world, only relying on second hand knowledge and snippets of information from the internet and television.

Books became a thing of the past, and the little banana and coconut country got smaller and smaller until, one day it disappeared because no-one wrote about it and no-one read about it, it simply just disappeared from memory.