William Poole reaches out to people with real vision everywhere

I was at the reopening of a university library here recently – and such occasions usually involve speeches.

Rather in the manner of some early Quaker, some chap from the university was going on about his “visions”, and I switched off after I had counted five “visions”. I wish they wouldn’t use the word. They mean ‘plan’, ‘vision’ being a subtly bullying substitute. I may criticise your plan, you see, but if I pooh-pooh your vision it’s as if I am infringing your religious rights.

The other verbal trick on show was that managerial punctuation mark pronounced “goingforwards”. It’s a kind of mark which hovers between the semicolon and the exclamation mark – “I’d like to compliment the head librarian on his vision-goingforwards; goingforwards – we shall be opening on Monday!”

Well, I’d like to ‘reach out’ – another horrid phrase, sounds like something we are not supposed to do to students in tutorials – to these cacozelic coves, perhaps through some classes in rhetoric. Friends! Oxonians! Librarians! Lend me your cash etc.

Instead I entertained my own visions of libraries. I’ve been to several interesting libraries hereabouts recently. Perhaps the most amazing is one I saw this morning, the Allestree Library in Christ Church, a time-capsule of a library, left exactly as it was bequeathed to the college by its owner, Richard Allestree, Regius Professor of Divinity, who died in 1681. It still stands in its original room, in its original furniture – some 4,000 volumes strong.

Its nearest equivalent is, somewhat surprisingly, the Kedermister Library of St Mary’s Church in Langley, Slough. This was created some time after 1613, and although it contains only a few hundred books, it’s a memorable space, still reached today through the Kedermister family pew, itself adorned inside with biblical texts and painted eyes forbiddingly inscribed in Latin “God is watching you”. There is pretty much no evidence that it was ever used, but it stands proudly in its own original garb, just as it has for 400 years.

The design of libraries is a fascinating thing. The ancient Greeks favoured a storeroom-and-colonnade model – you fetched your book from what was a kind of text-larder, and carried it out on to a colonnade, where you sat reading ‘open to nature’.

The Romans developed something much more like the modern library. The storeroom grew, and often split into two distinct libraries, one for Greek, one for Latin; and the space for storage became the space for reading too. Now the book is read among other books, and the reader is not so much charmed by a fine courtyard (art meets nature), as awed by books piled on books (art amidst yet more art).

I am certainly a Roman: now and then I start to read a book looking out over a nice view, but it too soon feels unacceptably romantic – give me rather the oppression of learning, the shaming ranks of books unread, the crushing sense of personal inadequacy that all great libraries should evoke.