Ingrid Vlieg

Review of Palmerston North City Library

Returning to Palmerston North to live, I was initi...

Returning to Palmerston North to live, I was initially very excited to rejoin the Library. I had virtually lived there as a child and teenager and had read and re-read volumes and volumes of books and so was equally excited about revisiting my "old friends".

Whilst the physical setting is spacious and attractive I found the categorising of books - both fiction and non-fiction confusing and made for disjointed browsing - what is wrong with alphabetical order and the Dewey system?

Hoping to revisit some old childhood classics I was dismayed to find all the good quality children's books had been discarded in favour of paper-backs. With the exception of Enid Blyton and Beverly Cleary it appears that any book written pre-2000 has been discarded. Where are the classics like the Bagthorpe series by Helen Cresswell, those by A Rutgers van der Loeff, the Noel Streatfeild books and others by John Christopher (author of the Tripods series), Madeleine L'Engle (yes granted one or two titles but none of the actual series) and also books by New Zealand authors such as our own Anne de Roo? The list goes on and such a pity. I was surprised to find there were a few CS Lewis books but several were not actual books. The wonderful YA section has been replaced by graphical books and recent paperbacks....

Moving to the adult fiction section I could find none of the books by authors such as David Nobbs (yes later books, but not the earlier ones in the series), Susan Howatch, Margaret Bingley, Paul Gallico, Jay Anson... and several other searches turned up zero. I did see a prolific collection of VC Andrews and several others of that genre. Again - it appears that anything from last century has been culled.

The space hardly appears over-crowded and it's ironic that there appears to be less of a choice than there was at the old library which was contained in a much, smaller building. If I did actually find what I was looking for in the catalogue it turns out to be in e-book format (such as another classic - George Orwell's Animal Farm!) which is useless if your device is not compatible. If I wanted e-books I could have stayed home. I want a library.... I WANT BOOKS and GOOD QUALITY ones. Bring back those and bring back the classics! Please!