Book Chat

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29850, 16 June 1962, Page 3

Book Chat

IA Fourth Leo:<er in “The Times’’}

It is natural to connect public libraries with the sign “Silence Please," but one library which has been opened by the Hendon Council in Cricklewood Lane, has decided to abolish it. “The notice saying ‘Silence Please' has had its day." the branch librarian is reported as saying "We want people to feel free to discuss the books." That is a bold and brave declaration, and it is to be hoped that the concentration of the earnest will not find itself waging a losing battle against the inconsequent chatter of the frivolous Urge to talk about books, to exchange news of discoveries, whether among new novelists or early eighteenthcentury diarists, is strong in the book-lover, and the only trouble is that discretion and proportion are sometimes lacking What is more, there is a kind of fifth column from the world of the Philistines which tends to regard books and reading as a ploy in the game of going one befer than friends and neighbours This inclines them to gush over a depressed. and depressing, volume which has been given an enthusiastic review in some esoteric journal, and the facts that no-one has heard of it and that it is unobtainable merely add to the prestige score

More simple are those who think that the soul of a book —and for book, in this context, read novel—resides solely in the story and who are determined to give their version of it from beginning to end. This is seldom accomplished all in one piece, as it were, and in a direct line There is a deal of casting about, after the manner of hounds uncertain of the scent, as to exactly what it was the hero said to the villain "at a critical moment m that exciting chapter towards the end or how the heroine —“Mildred. I think her name was. No. wait a minute, it was Celia”—came to be marooned in the attic of the flooded house. Shaw’s Ear] of Warwick, who went much, perhaps too much, on

what a book looked like, would not have approved of such prattle and it is easy to sympathise with him. Nevertheless, it affords what is. in essence, innocent pleasure, and as such it may perhaps be preferred to that 'warning against conversation.