The public library: an exemplar of public luxury

If they did not already exist, public libraries would be an alien, outlandish proposal. At their centre lies a simple notion: knowledge should be accessible to everyone. But this notion runs against organising principles in our economy and society – principles like the monetization of intellectual property, the maximisation of profit or of market-led distribution and planning – and, as such, libraries occupy the strange position of being both mundane and exceptional, a form of everyday luxury.

Like a store, a shop or a market, libraries are primarily associated with access. These are all places we visit to get things – and there’s an ambiguous overlap to their definitions. Yet libraries organise access differently to markets, offering strange mutations to familiar logics: choice, determined by a shared resource pool and archive, not short-term cost imperatives and business cases; growth, first of all as nourishment to the people and ideas that inhabit them; and freedom, since unlike a market their archives can be free from access costs and open on a universal basis.

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