In the 1980s and 1990s many communities struggled to retain their red telephone boxes as British Telecom did their best to replace them with modern glass and steel booths. Those that survived are now seen as a part of the historic landscape, but very few now have telephones inside. The box in our village does because we have no reliable mobile phone signal, but in neighbouring Melmerby the box has been converted into a community library.
Of course, it is not a proper library with computers, dvd players, specialist support services, and areas set aside for a range of community groups, with cheerful librarians failing to get to grips with barcode scanners. No, this is a library with shelves of books, albeit one that holds less than a hundred, and into which only one person can enter at a time. The Melmerby phone box library is an heroically archaic idea, but it is cramped, so if you have brought the wrong glasses with you, you can’t take a step back to read the spines of the books.
When I visited earlier today, the shelves were the usual mix that would cause any professional librarian to have a panic attack. With a casual disregard of the Dewey Decimal System, there were cookery books, religious texts, self-help manuals, thrillers and romances, many of which seemed to have survived at least two divorces, a fire and a flood. In its time, the shelves have been tainted by the various hagiographies of the now discredited Lance Armstrong, and the less than literary works of Russell Brand and Jordan. But I am not a complete snob; I was delighted to see there were still books by Barbara Taylor Bradford, James Clavell and Jane Fonda.
I know our neighbour Edgar uses the phone box library; he recently donated several novels that had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. This struck me as both generous and faintly intimidating. I half suspect he also slipped in an early printing of Richard Powers’s The Overstory as well, a book so big each copy must account for a tree in itself. It was next to a colossal fantasy novel by Chaz Brenchley that occupied most of a shelf by itself, the way a large cat can monopolise an armchair. It seems to be smugly aware that it was even bigger than The Overstory, even if it never had the same critical reception, or sold as well. Somehow, I am sure this wasn’t donated by Edgar.
Local people obviously supply the telephone box library, although I suspect that holidaymakers in the area probably contribute to the stock. People arrive for a week with three novels, read half of one during a rainstorm, and then deposit the remainder in the telephone box as though it were a literary compost heap. Last year, I discovered a small, old, French-language edition of The Devil in the Flesh by Raymond Radiguet, and at first I was rather struck by the idea that such a book had travelled all the way to a village phone box in the Dales. Then I realised that if it had been left by a French tourist, they had decided they couldn’t be bothered to take it back home with them.
The lack of order in the phone box is a part of the charm. Immediately inside the door there are three books shelved with the look of people forced, unwillingly to share a bus seat. I am intrigued by how a book on the Bhagavad-Gita and another on the Lost Art of Scripture can have a slim volume entitled The Sacred Neuron shelved in between them. The arrangement made me feel as though I had stumbled into a Radio Four debate. Very close to these, on the same shelf, were three Colin Forbes novels tied together with a piece of string. Someone had bound them together in string with a note in careful handwriting attached:
Old Books but a very good read. Enjoy x
I appreciate the optimism of the ‘x’. It suggests the writer believes the next reader may be a close friend rather than, say, a wet walker seeking shelter. However, what that wet walker might really need is at least one good thriller to pass a few hours until the rain stops.
Right beside the Forbes novels sits Sartre’s Iron in the Soul trilogy, which has not been tied with string nor endorsed with affectionate punctuation. No one has written:
Very cheerful read. Enjoy x
Elsewhere, the juxtapositions become more surreal: Terry Wogan’s autobiography leans companionably against The Gardening Year, and next on the shelf, like a guest nobody quite remembers inviting, is a well-thumbed copy of Foucault’s Pendulum. The three books together create a small cultural sandwich: Irish broadcasting legend, seasonal horticultural advice, and a 600-page Italian conspiracy novel which may or may not be a comedy.
Then there is the science-fiction section, which appears to consist of exactly one Star Wars omnibus placed next to a book called Fleeing Isis. I don’t know if this is deliberate or if the phone box simply has an ‘all rebellions welcome’ policy.
While browsing I was alone, though not unobserved. A tractor passed slowly along the road, its driver giving me the sort of look usually reserved for people who might be up to no good. More unsettling were the cows in the adjacent field; they gathered along the stone wall and watched me with quiet interest, as though waiting to see if I would give them access to this literary cornucopia.
I have contributed to the phone box myself. Some years ago I placed several Tartarus Press volumes inside, feeling momentarily noble. Unfortunately winter arrived, bringing with it the sort of damp that used to make traditional telephone directories bloat. Tartarus dust jackets are not laminated, so when I returned a month later, they had begun to develop delicate constellations of furry mould.
I also left a copy of my own magnum opus Fifty Forgotten Books. I was pleased to see that it was soon snapped up, and I was feeling quite pleased with myself, not that telephone box library loans mean I can claim anything from the Public Lending Rights office. I like to think that Fifty Forgotten Books ought to be a book anyone would want to keep, but I later noticed the borrower felt obliged to return it.
Of course, I haunt the telephone box library, because, occasionally, treasures do appear. I found novels by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Coupland, there, a great book on The Craft of Literary Biography, and quite a few Peanuts paperbacks. My most recent discovery was a copy of Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent. I read it with a growing appreciation of the author’s craft until I reached the final scene, which was so startlingly bad that I had to check whether the last page had been replaced by a substitute from the novelisation of a 1980s James Bond film starring Roger Moore.
What I like most about the Melmerby telephone box library is that every book in it raises questions about who donated the books, and why? Was my game-dealing neighbour once a fan of Penny Vincenzi? Did the farmer who lives opposite us enjoy origami? Of course, as with The Devil in the Flesh, I have to ask these questions in the past tense because they are obviously no longer wanted. But, who, locally, thought anybody else would be interested in a 1970s Pontefract bus timetable?
Red telephone boxes were once as indispensible as we now regard mobile phones and the internet, but today the box in Melmerby has another role. It hosts strange negotiations between readers who might only ever meet by chance: the cook who trades a book of casserole recipes for Sartre, the French holidaymaker who abandons a classic of their own literature for the biography of Terry Wogan, the mysterious person who ties together three Colin Forbes novels like a literary bouquet.
You step inside for a moment, browse a little while the cows watch and tractors pass, and the discoloured Perspex of the windows rattle with the passing shower . . . and you leave with something unexpected. It is, in its own small way, the most perfect library imaginable.
(R.B. Russell)
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