Library of Wales

Did Alun Pugh leave us a legacy? In his time at the helm of Wales’ culture ministry the Clwyd West AM certainly maintained a high profile. His decision in 2005 to spend many thousands reviving the fortunes of the Welsh book trade was seen by some as clinging to the past. His centrepiece was the Library of Wales – a uniform series of inexpensive, edited reprints of Welsh classics. Editions would be uniform and would be distributed free to schools. They would concentrate exclusively on Welsh writing in English and would revive the fortunes of the lost Anglo-Welsh. The past would be shifted back into the present. Our heritage, and in particular our industrial working-class heritage would not be lost amid a welter of soft latter-day Bay-side living.

Leighton Andrews AM had been hunting in his local bookstore for a Rhondda novel by Jack Jones and was dismayed to learn that the great man had been out of print for years. How could Welsh valley communities be understood if their history and literary heritage was invisible? He argued the case in a piece for the Western Mail. Alun Pugh shared this view. A fiscal correction needed to be applied. Resource was found. Prof Dai Smith was appointed as series editor. History was back. A world was rediscovered.

Initial scepticism from some quarters soon vanished. The idea that reviving the past might reduce opportunities in the present proved to be a paper tiger. Dai Smith recruited some of our best contemporary authors to write forwards to each volume. Ron Berry, Gwyn Thomas, Lewis Jones, Alun Richards, Alun Lewis, Rhys Davies, Dorothy Edwards, Raymond Williams, Emyr Humphreys and Dannie Abse rode again. So too did some more unexpected voices. Indeed some of whom many of us had not heard: Jeremy Brooks, Howell Davies, Stuart Evans. Add to all that a pair of heavy-weight century-busting door-stop anthologies – Meic Stephens’s Poetry 1900-2000 and Gareth Williams’s Sport (a 2008 best-seller) and you have a list to be envied. It was the making of Parthian Books - a solid back list of unquestionable value with guaranteed upfront sales. People out there even began to collect them.

The latest crop continues Dai’s mix of predictable eclecticism. Another Gwyn Thomas, a Brenda Chamberlain, a not unexpected Geraint Goodwin and then, right out of left field, the wild and wilful The Caves of Alienation from Stuart Evans.

There’s a myth around that Wales never quite got its head around modernism and ended up refusing to join in. No James Joyce or Virginia Woolf or Gertrude Stein for us. We had Dylan Thomas. For many he was regarded as edgy enough. But out in the Welsh back rooms where David Jones and others lived new ways of looking at the world were in operation. Stuart Evans’s multi-faceted, many voiced approach was one. Ignored when it first appeared but justly celebrated now. The Library of Wales scores again.

A version of this blog appeared in the Western Mail on saturday 31 January, 2009

The Old Book Destock Trick

Convinced that my Institute of Welsh Affairs blog entry (http://www.iwa.org.uk/blog/) on a subject that is heating things up among academics and librarians (if not quite yet the larger reading public) could do with some personal pushing I repeat it here.

Is the decision by Cardiff Council to auction off some of its ancient and valuable book stock a harbinger of larger change to come? I think so. If the book trade hasn’t yet hit the sort of hurricane season that the world of finance has then it is only a matter of time. The digitisation of everything from bestsellers to the documents which define your personal identity are not just around the corner but actually upon us.

Recently the National Library of Wales announced its ten-year plan to digitise a large section of its holdings and to make the results instantly and universally accessible online: books, artworks, documents, letters, maps. Its previous plan to digitise entire runs of twentieth century Welsh periodicals is almost complete. This has been managed despite storms of protest from original authors. These have yet to abate.

All this poses the big question: Do we need original manuscripts when virtual ones allow the world and its uncle slick and searchable access at will?Old books, and in particular those from the dawn of print, cannot simply be put onto a shelf and called up from the stacks for any casual visitor to handle. They need to be preserved with care, viewed under controlled conditions, repaired, conserved, de-foxed, cleaned, pressed, boxed, have their rot excised and their bindings mended. All that takes money. Cardiff says it is already overstretched and simply cannot find the resource to care for the 18,000 antiquarian volumes, maps and original manuscripts it has decided put up for sale.

The yard sale it proposed has been replicated at libraries elsewhere and not just in the UK either. Libraries, once eternal guardians and repositories of our cultural heritage, can now be seen engaging in Fahrenheit 451 style stock clearances. Get rid of these dirty things. They are mere containers. Their content is that which matters.

It’s a point of view. Many don’t share it.

What troubles me is that conservation and research are developing arts. Who’s to say what the future may be able to extract from an original document actually handled by its original author. More than could be got from a digital replica that’s for sure.

Cardiff Council has since backtracked slightly and are in discussions with Cardiff University about the preservation of at least some of the Welsh-interest component of its soon to be flogged-off holdings. All will not be gone. Just a lot of it.

How much of the past should we preserve? Certainly not everything. How do we make choices? Not that Cardiff were intending to make choices. There were no proposals to digitise and thus release the original as surplus. This was shelf clearance. And it’s not that this kind of thing hasn’t happened before. Check the stacks at Bute’s once great library at Cardiff Castle. Empty. Did you spot the stock leaving? Me neither.