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- 2 CASINO NIGHTS The good people who have kindly volunteered to get involved in this fund-raising effort will be 'hard at if on the nights of March 21st and 22nd, so we hope to be able to give you good news (fingers crossed) at the meeting on March 23rd. VILLAGE LIBRARIES THREATENED IN BRITAIN The Village Library is going to have to find a new home, and the shop is the obvious place.' Beware of a man of one book, said the Vicar, quoting Aquinas. A shepherd who cannot read will know more about sheep than the wisest bookworm. Will the wisest bookworm wear his best dust-jacket? asked the innkeeper. Only when he is reading from the Book of Lamentation, said the head teacher. The three of them were attending a meeting in the village school, where the locals had gathered to protest about the decline of the county's library services. It was a litany of lamentation. Their"s is a county that has long had more than the national average number of libraries per head of the population, precisely because it is a rural county of small towns and villages, each, until now, [Oct. 1993] with its own library. One village library, albeit the smallest in the county, has already been closed, and although the people have been promised that no more will be closed this year, they fear for the future. Staffing levels in the libraries have been reduced, the polite way of saying library staff have been dismissed. Library opening hours have also been reduced. And the mobile library services have been reorganised - in other words, they visit fewer places. And there is less money to buy books for the libraries. It was no comfort to those assembled to be told that other counties are much worse off and that urban boroughs are suffering the most. Nor was it any comfort to be told that CD's and video tapes are increasingly popular.. Britain, said one old lady, quoting someone more recent than Aquinas, is a nation of the book, the handiest package of pleasure and power yet devised. Quite right, said the teacher, who happened to be the old lady's son, What then is to be done? asked the vicar. Perhaps I could help, said the village shopkeeper. But we want to borrow books, not to buy them, said the old lady. That is what I have in mind, said the shopkeeper. He went on to explain that he had read in a trade journal about a pilot scheme in a county on the other side of England. In three villages there, he said, the local library has been amalgamated into the village shop. The villages are of different sizes. One has a population of a thousand, one of five hundred, and one of three hundred. The shop in each village is given, by the county, a collection of between five hundred and eight hundred books, which are changed every month. Each shop also has a computer terminal link with the main county library system, and the three village shop libraries are treated like any other branch library. But are the local people using the libraries? asked the old lady. Yes, he said, they are. In fact in the first twelve months of the scheme the lending of books in the three villages totalled 19,000. And that, I am told is two or three times more than in normal village libraries and far, far more than in a mobile library. 73