Outi Pickering

There are not a lot of books that announce the denouement in their own title!

Outi Pickering is a recently retired former librarian who has used her experience in a staff library at a NHS hospital in the UK, as fodder for a venture into writing. The Library Always Wins (2018) is her second effort, the first being Two Point Five Cheers for the Library. (2015) Both of them are published by an outfit called Olympia Publishers, whose website I consulted because of suspicions I had about the show more editing of this book. Yes, Olympia do what they call traditional publishing, but if they are unable to offer a traditional contract, they make an alternative offer [...] known as a ‘partnership contract’ and is based on a contribution, to be paid by the author, to cover initial production and printing of the work. Well, I hope Pickering didn't contribute much of her retirement savings, though the fact that this book made its way to prominent display at a suburban library in Melbourne on the other side of the world, indicates that the title is marketable, at least to libraries and the people who love them.

The story is a simple one, and familiar. As one who helped to man the barricades when a premier best forgotten wanted to close libraries all over Melbourne, I recognise the panic when closure seems imminent. The library staff at Cardigan Bay Healthscare Library are beset by the plans of bean-counters, so they rally as best they can, handicapped by their own follies and foibles. The tone of the book is established by the ludicrous names of the characters: Simon Pendrive is the manager and Vladimir Logoff is the IT librarian. Outsider Claire Twinset — otherwise known as The Choke (Chief Officer for Knowledge Etc) — is the replacement manager when Simon takes leave to join his amateur choir for three weeks. Her supervisor is Justin Drakonian. And so on.

A series of mildly amusing episodes take place, culminating in, as the title told us it would, the library's triumph. Having been told, repeatedly, about the intrinsic worth of the work this library does, it comes as a bit of an anti-climax to find that its reprieve is based on exactly that. The circumstances, however, seem highly unlikely to me. But what would I know about the professionalism of the NHS? Maybe they are a bunch of incompetents who need to read reference books during surgery.

But surely there's YouTube on an iPad for that? show less