The Bookseller.com

8th January 2009

Alan Gibbons is a children's writer and independent educational consultant

Campaigning for the Book

05.09.08

It started with a phone call. The Save the Libraries Campaign in Doncaster asked me to speak. On a hot July evening I addressed a packed upstairs room in the town, setting out the role reading had played in my life and offering my support.

The son of a farm labourer and a shop assistant, I was lucky enough to get hooked on books early. My love of reading took me to the University of Warwick, a career in teaching and now a second career as a children's author. In this capacity I visit 150 schools and libraries a year and my lectures take me to Cyprus, Switzerland, China, France, Spain, Singapore, Bahrain and Brazil to name just a few of the more exciting destinations.

Two weeks after that meeting Helena Pielichaty and I addressed several hundred local people protesting at cuts to the library budget. I emailed many of my friends and colleagues in the book world and sent a statement to the Doncaster press. That's when the horror stories started to pour in. There was the national expert on children's literature, who had her pay cut by £7,000. There was the librarian whose head teacher closed the library and axed her job. There was the school library that boxed up all the books and turned the room into an ICT suite.

But didn't a widely reported Unesco report conclude that reading for pleasure was more important than wealth or social class in ensuring academic success? What were all these managers and bureaucrats thinking?

I launched the campaign at the Society of Authors Children's Writers and Illustrators conference this weekend and there are already 300 signatories including Michael Rosen, David Almond, Anne Fine, Anthony Browne, Malorie Blackman and Beverley Naidoo. The campaign is initially defensive of course. We want to stop the rot, setting up a network linking authors, illustrators, librarians, teachers and members of the public. Our charter is simple, drawn up to achieve the greatest unity in the defence of reading for pleasure. It mustn't stop there.

It is so easy for a campaign to sound like a moan-athon. But our ambition is to do more than protest at library cuts. We have to try to change the intellectual climate. There is a huge amount of defeatism about. Publishers are downbeat about the state of the market. The government prefers tracking and testing to books, songs and poems. Ultimately we have to show there is a better way, to demonstrate that there is an alternative to Gradgrindism and cuts.

If you would like to join the Campaign for the Book email aagibbons@blueyonder.co.uk