Editors’ preface

With the growing interest in reader development and the increasing sense that libraries can have an important new role in social regeneration, this chapter about a public library service's involvement in the Get Into Reading project will make inspiring reading.

This chapter takes reader development from the practitioners, librarians and partners directly to the reader. The voices of readers are important: they have a lot to say to the information professional. This chapter shows how readers pick up on staff attitudes, and illustrates some of their attitudes to libraries.

Introduction: foul-weather friends

My mother was a docker's daughter who won a scholarship to a public school. Her life went badly askew during her marriage and divorce, and she died in unhappy circumstances in her early 50s. An avid reader of trashy novels, she liked good books too, and during my younger childhood, when things had not yet become too bad, she read to me: Heidi, The Wind in the Willows, Tales from the Arabian Nights, My Family and Other Animals. One of my strongest memories is of her pulling her hair down and over her face to recite some of the witches’ stuff from Macbeth: ‘Where the place?/Upon the heath/There to meet with Macbeth.’! She would get us all screaming and hiding behind the couch. That was the residual benefit we got from her scholarship.

I grew up as the oldest of four children in a poor and pretty chaotic singleparent family. My local library, Toxteth in Liverpool, was a refuge. They let me take out adult books on a junior ticket. Aged 12 and recently graduated from The Borrowers and The Hobbit, I read Strike the Father Dead, a novel by John Wain. I don't think I understood it, but that didn't seem to matter. I read Under Milk Wood and borrowed an LP of it. However, I left school at 16 with just two GCEs – English language and art – two you could get without doing any work. English literature – which we called ‘books’ at home – was a mainstay against unhappiness but the way you had to ‘do’ it at school seemed unnatural and required a level of discipline and concentration I didn't have. Themes in Romeo and Juliet: what a weird way to talk to 15-yearolds! I truanted or just blanked out.