The idea of a public library was born in Britain in 1850. This was the idea that a library should be funded by the government and should provide a majority of its services for free. Many politicians in Britain were opposed to the idea because they did not think the working classes would benefit from such libraries. One political leader, Colonel Charles de Laet Waldo Sibthorp, known widely as Colonel Sibthorp and frequently caricatured as a typical idiot thrown up by the British upper classes, and, unsurprisingly an ultra-Tory politician, said that he did not see the point of such libraries because when he was in University at Oxford he hated reading and since his days there did not read at all. This reminds me of Steinbach’s Mayor A.D. Penner when a public library was petitioned for in the 1970s who said he did not see the need for a public library because his children didn’t read.

Of course, since then public libraries have not always prospered. Some governments saw them as a prime opportunity for cost cutting by elimination or underfunding whenever the need for funds arose. As a result, from time to time, like current times, libraries in many places are declining in numbers or vibrancy. Richard Ovenden the Oxford librarian said it was a disgrace how Britain had allowed libraries to decline so badly. He calls libraries “an essential piece of social infrastructure.”

I couldn’t agree with him more.