How to access any book ever written, for free
These days, I rarely buy books. They’re too much of an encumbrance for my new travel-light philosophy. Even back in my book-buying days, I managed to avoid buying a single boring academic book for my university studies. How? Because I know how to use a library properly. People are sometimes mystified by this. “They never have what I want!” is a popular complaint.
Understanding how to use a library will counter most claims that libraries are too limited in their stock. Most of them are well stocked by expert librarians whose purchasing choices are informed by clever online “current awareness” systems. Tiny parochial libraries might have modest stocks due to funding limitation but even these can work to your advantage if you use them as portals to the Interlibrary Loan system.
Use the catalogue, not the shelf. Whether you’re looking for a specific book (Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre) or have a more general request (“Something about Bad Faith“), the online catalogue is the best place to start. You can probably access this from your home Internet connection or by asking a library assistant to search on your behalf (even over the telephone) or from specially-designated terminals in the library building. The catalogue will show you precisely where the book is located and whether it is currently available for you. If the book’s already on loan, you should be able to reserve it, usually at no cost.
Ask a librarian for alternatives. If the library doesn’t own a copy of the book you want, make an official recommendation to a librarian. If the book sounds like it might be useful to people more generally, the librarian might buy a copy for the library, which you’d be able to borrow on arrival. If they remain skeptical, ask whether you can acquire it via Interlibrary Loan. There is a cost attached to this process, which they might ask you to pay. It’s up to you whether you pay this or visit a different library. Sometimes, a librarian will be able to search other libraries for you using a database like WorldCat or COPAC.
Be a member of several library systems. Your public library will be part of a wider network of libraries, to which you will also be able to borrow. For example, if you’re a member of Dudley Public Library in the British West Midlands, you’ll also be a member of the various branch libraries scattered around the borough. Your library card will work in any of these. It’s worth getting a library card, if possible, for another neighbouring public library system too (i.e. Wolverhampton Libraries as well as Dudley Libraries), though whether you can do this will depend on the geographical location of your home.
If your national library (such as the British Library in London or the Library of Congress in Washington) is within commuting distance, I recommend getting a [free] library card to this. Your national library will be the best-stocked library in your country (and if it’s a copyright deposit library, which it probably is, it will have a copy of almost every book published in the last couple of centuries).
Many universities also offer a low-cost membership scheme to members of the non-academic public. You can probably get an annual subscription to your local university for a sum of money. Check their website for details. Remember that their remit is to cater for students and researchers though, so don’t expect them to have copies of the latest Stephen King paperback (though they actually do sometimes).
The more library cards you collect, the greater access you’ll have to the world’s literature. I never felt so rich as I did when contemplating the value of the books to which I’ve had free access in Glasgow’s Mitchell Library or Montreal’s Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec.
Of course, you don’t even need a library card to use the library. If you can’t get borrowers’ rights in a public library, you can still use it as a reference collection. Feel free to stroll into any public library in the Western world and read as many books or periodicals as you like while on the premises. I’m not a member of Westmount Public Library or Atwater Library in Montreal but they’re among my favourite places to spend time when I’m in this city.
If all else fails, use eBay like a lending library. Buy it, read it and immediately relist it (getting your money back in the process).
This article originally appeared in Issue 4 of New Escapologist. I’m posting it in honour of the current library situation in Britain, but if you enjoyed it, please consider buying a copy of Issue 4 or one of our other publications.
Save the libraries
800 public libraries are threatened with closure in the UK. A terrible thing for Escapologists, who often use public libraries a base of operations. To all of us – Escapologist or otherwise – public libraries are invaluable.
Ages ago, in the Idler, I wrote:
A good library can be a comfortable oasis amid the hubbub of an otherwise busy city and the best sort is host to everything the urban flaneur holds dear: peace and quiet, dog-eared books, crackly old jazz records, fascinating characters lurking in every corner and haphazard furnishings liberated from innumerable closed-down gentleman’s clubs. Today’s library directors are forced to go the extra mile to make these oases all the more appealing: these days the daily papers are laid out ready for you; access is granted to the digital delights of the Internet; librarians are getting younger and more attractive and it’s all absolutely free. Many public libraries are even installing coffee and tea facilities for their punters. No wonder Ray Bradbury described these as “birthing places of the universe”. All we need now are on-site tobacconists and somewhere to get some shut-eye and we need not ever bother going home.
I really don’t want the libraries to go. There are at least an encouraging number of people coming forward to do something about it. Activism is happening everywhere, from Twitter campaigns, to celebrity action, to full library occupations and shelf-runs.
Let’s show the authorities that we still love our libraries. Most of the threatened libraries will have special events coming up and petitions to sign, so do pop into your local library and ask how you can help.
I know some of our readers are librarians. If your libraries (threatened or otherwise) would like to stock New Escapologist, get in touch and I’ll send you some complementary issues.
How TV ruined your life: Aspiration
It’s effectively a shopping channel of stuff that could have been yours, if only you’d been born in America and learned to rap instead of sitting on your arse in Taunton watching Cribs.
Mr Minimalist
I minimised my wardrobe by vowing to dress smartly every day. I now own a suit, a few shirts, some t-shirts, underwear and some casual pants. I have three pairs of shoes: formal, casual and snow. Half a suitcase. Why any human male would need anything else is beyond me.
I wrote a little piece about my relationship with minimalism for Miss Minimalist’s blog. Enjoy!
Typecast
Nihilist.org.uk is the website of New Escapologist‘s typographer, Tim.
Here, you can see his other typographic projects, including his latest: A year in Pyongyang by Andrew Holloway.
I can personally vouch for Tim’s own account of a trip to North Korea in 2002: an amazing book available for a couple of quid through Lulu.
“His dreams are about professional advancement”
The forthcoming Issue Five of New Escapologist features an essay by Reggie Chamberlain-King about composer, pianist and bona-fide Bohemian, Erik Satie.
Among Satie’s pieces (which often have brilliant names along the lines of Flabby Preludes for a Dog and Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear), is “Sonatine Bureaucratique“: a musical satire of a bureaucrat’s walk to work. The lyrics on this video rendition are great, and someone has also set some office CCTV footage to Satie’s music. The result is very funny:
In Our Time: Bohemianism
Bohemianism meant a life lived for art, it meant sexual liberation and freedom from social constraint, but it also meant dodging the landlord and burning your poems to stay warm. How did the garret-philosophy of the Parisian Latin Quarter take over the drawing rooms of Bloomsbury and Chelsea, and why did a French war with necessity emerge as a British life-style as art?
Here‘s a nice Radio 4 documentary about Bohemianism; the subject of our pending fifth issue. Given that this was last broadcast in 2003, I am amazed that it’s available to listen to online. Thanks, BBC.
Just Right
If something takes a physical form, it must fill a need. These needs can be emotional needs or the needs of day-to-day life. I need a broom to sweep my apartment, but I also need that painting by my friend Pete on my wall because it reminds me of my friends in Chicago and also what it was like when I was first setting up my design practice. When we choose to have physical objects in our life, we need to make sure the need is real.
Graphic designer, Frank Chimero has a great take on minimalism, or, as he sees it, ‘just-right-ism’.
Most perceptively, he writes (as we often do at New Escapologist) that the real end of minimalism (or just-right-ism) is freedom:
Fundamentally, I think the satisfactory outcome for all of this is freedom, meaning the ability to say both yes and no. I think often times we cast freedom as merely the ability to say yes to the things we want, but let’s face it: it’s usually easy to exercise that freedom if you’re a lucky citizen of a modernized country. We’re a culture prone to indulgence, and usually the times we deny ourselves the freedom of doing or having the things or experiences we want are the instances that courage is required to commit. These would be things like quitting your job and starting your own business, or booking a 3 week romp in southeast Asia. That courage is something that Appropriatism, or any other mode of thinking, can’t give you. One just needs to summon it in themselves.
What I mean by freedom is the ability to say no. I don’t consider this a negative way of thinking, but rather a very positive way to have permission to opt out of the things we don’t want to do. I feel we need to acknowledge the value of the freedom derived from simplifying and eliminating the useless things in our life. This means having an understanding of what’s important.
The whole article is here and is well worth a read.
Thanks, Neil, for the link.
An Escapologist’s Diary. Part 22.
It’s been a busy month for this Escapologist. Can’t help feeling that life would have been less exhausting if I’d kept my job. Of course, it wouldn’t have been half as fun, as this diary entry will hopefully show.
When my partner and I first met, she half-jokingly told me that her life’s ambition was to pet a penguin. Romantic idiot that I am, I’ve been looking for penguin-petting opportunities ever since.
It seems to be a fairly popular ambition, but difficult to achieve. Most wildlife sanctuaries forbid it. The little zoo in my home town of Dudley wouldn’t make an exception and a zoo in Edinburgh, famous for a pretty undignified ‘penguin parade’, would not permit it either. In fact, there are probably only two or three places in the world – short of visiting Antarctica – that allow laypeople to handle the proud flightless birds.
A behind-the-scenes research centre at Florida’s Sea World theme park extends a rare opportunity to meet penguins. When we went to Florida this month, ostensibly for a family wedding, I was able to arrange the long-anticipated penguin encounter as a special treat.
The King Penguin we met was a very regal little bird but didn’t seem to mind being touched by humans at all. He was also a very solid and muscular fellow. I hadn’t anticipated how soft and feathery he would be either: I’d imagined his texture would be ‘fatty’, like a wet suit or certain types of fish. It goes to show that you have to experience these things to know. Later, I also had the privilege of meeting a puffin.
Tom Mellors on Free Will
This is a guest post by New Escapologist contributor, Tom Mellors.
In a recent article in the Independent entitled “The uncomfortable truth about mind control: Is free will simply a myth?”, Michael Mosley argued that, although we don’t like to admit it, the notion that humans have free will is a delusion.
Mosley cites the work of psychologist Stanley Milgram to back up his argument. Milgram is famous for a controversial experiment in which volunteers were enlisted to take part in a “memory and learning experiment”. According to Mosley, Milgram wrote that the experiment was intended to answer the question: “How is possible, I ask myself, that ordinary people who are courteous and decent in everyday life could act callously, inhumanely, without any limitations of conscience.”
Read the rest of this entry »
