The nostalgia of libraries – Nostalgia Central

Why is going to a public library like being transported 40 or 50 years back in time? Perhaps it’s that musty smell which seems to fill every old library . . .

The magazine racks have always contained material targeted to such a specialist market that you would think no one would read them – Concrete Monthly or Industrial Safety and Monitoring Equipment Weekly . . . and yet these mags always seemed well leafed through and read by the assembled crowd of OAP’s, tramps and people on day release from the local psychiatric hospital.

And there was always Amateur Photographer – for early teenage awakenings.

The library was always a good place for the class dodging school crowd – and in the 1980s, it was a good place to get access to those dreaded BBC Acorn Doomsday Machines on the pretence of doing educational research whilst secretly playing Repton 2 or Elite instead.

Before the internet dropped a search bar into our lives, knowledge-hunting was a physical activity.

You couldn’t Google Jack!

You had to hunt that knowledge down. Through card catalogues. Tiny drawers of alphabetised magic. Each card was a breadcrumb in your quest for the perfect book, mag or obscure zine.

It went like this:

• Pull open a drawer.
• Flip through index cards like you were cracking a safe.
• Scribble down mysterious Dewey codes.
• Hunt through the stacks like Indiana Jones.

There was something oddly satisfying about the ritual. It was tactile. Textural. And let’s be real – flipping through cards was way cooler than waiting for a loading screen.

And don’t even get me started on photocopies and MICROFILM!

The cataloguing and ticketing have changed, but libraries still contain a great array of books that have been there for decades.

And cassettes of bagpipe bands.

And library staff have a determinedly unsurprised, democratic way of helping anyone with any book request without asking why you want it.

“Archived Theses on Developments in Indonesian Agricultural Blades? Is that the paperback or the hardback, sir?”

So, if you ever stumble across a Brutalist concrete building with tall windows and a faint paper smell . . . go inside.

There might still be magic on the shelves.