For the love of books

I was at an event this month where we were asked to get to know one-other by finding a partner and describing an early cultural memory. It was lovely to hear people's stories of panto, of street performance, of music and dance. For me, though, it's always been books.

A delightful thing about this photo is that the tape in my walkman is almost certainly an audio book.

The library has always been a happy place, a place of incredible abundance (all those books! for free!), the answers to almost of all life's questions, a space of reliable calm and comforting routine even as I bounced from city to city through my twenties and early thirties. Bookshops, too, places of endless possibility and rabbit-holes for curiosity. I was brought up on an insatiable diet of books, bouncing with barely a pause for breath from Janet and Allan Ahlberg to Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton, then onward via Judy Blume and Jill Murphy to E. Nesbit and C. S. Lewis.

I feel incredibly lucky to now live about thirty steps from the front door of an independent bookshop (although luckier, perhaps, that it's only about twenty to the public library). I have clear memories of being given book vouchers at school (free money! more abundance!), which would be blown immediately on Point Horrors, Nancy Drew or Sweet Valley High. Later, I found identity, community and no-little education in independent bookshops like Lighthouse Books, Category Is Books, Rare Birds and Typewronger. And at the iconic Glasgow Women's Library, of course, where tea and cake is always available alongside feminist books, community archives and queer history. I love the blurred boundaries between the public and the commercial, with community spaces, passion-projects and niche expertise popping up wherever you look in the book world. Not least at Scotland's wealth of iconic book festivals; this August I accidentally walked face-first into Jacqueline-actual-Wilson at the Edinburgh Book Festival.

All that being said, it's perhaps surprising that my work in the cultural sector has been less bookish than I might have liked. I volunteer with Give A Book, a charity dedicated to promoting books and the pleasure of reading in the hardest places. I've had some really special opportunities to work alongside, commission and hire authors and writers in various capacities, and can always be relied on to advocate for libraries and literacy through my cross-sector work with Culture Counts. I've jumped at the occasional opportunity to Chair author talks and host book groups. But perhaps it tells a story that although my work focusses on participatory and community-rooted creativity, and despite working mostly with organisations in reciept of public (ie. Creative Scotland, rather than local authority) funding, reading tends to feature less prominently. Do we take access to reading for granted? Do the quieter communities built around reading attract less attention than the showier worlds of theatre, dance and music? Does the social impact created by independent bookstores place them largely outside the realm of public funding? Or are my networks in the sector simply directing me to opportunites outside the bookish? I'd hope not, but a resolution for 2026 is to gently begin to explore opportunities to extend my freelancing tentacles into the literary, and to seek out projects that nourish, and are nourished by, my lifelong love of books and reading.

Maybe I'll see you there?