THE INSTRUCTIONS are clear: readers may bring hot and cold drinks into the Gladstone Link provided they are in covered travel cups approved by the library. That’s the Bodleian Library in Oxford, which will explain the concept of the travel cup, which, though made of paper or polystyrene, is classified by its purpose. Like calling a car a people carrier or a sink a washhand basin.
But the whole idea of being allowed bring a drink into such an august library at all is revolutionary. However, given that so many people walk around these days with a travel cup seemingly velcroed to the palm of their hands, and that an equal number of people seem unable to even to strike out across the street without a litre of bottled water to sustain them during their perilous 50-second dash to the other side, it’s no surprise that the Bodleian has taken this innovatory step.
Undergraduates, like students the world over, now take it for granted they can drink at their library desk so that the Bod, which first came into existence in 1488, albeit as a small room, is merely catching up with the moving times.
But why the Gladstone Link? The answer lies, not surprisingly, in books. Too many of them, in fact. Because the Bod is a copyright library, it has a right to one copy of every book published in Britain and in Ireland.
In 1914, the library held more than one million books, most of them stored underground. By this century, the number had grown to 11 million book-related items and that’s a lot to store.
Those books kept underground were shunted, under the quadrangle, along a tunnel from one part of the library to another before being brought up to ground level to be distributed to readers who had requested them.
But storage remained a problem and though plans were submitted to build a multistorey depository in Oxford this was rejected on the grounds that the city, lying in the flood plain of the Thames, was not the ideal place to store books.
Another site has now been found near Swindon, housing 153 kilometres of shelving. And a compromise has been reached back in Oxford.
Those books that are frequently requested will be stored underground, on shelves where readers can actually access them themselves – another small revolutionary move on the part of the library. Ordinary people, as any librarian will tell you, cannot be relied upon to put books back in their right place. And actually, in the Gladstone Link, that danger is avoided by having repatriation trolleys where you put your book when finished with it, leaving the proper librarian to put it back where it should be.
Don’t you love the repatriation bit? Or should I get out more? The link part comes from the fact that the old underground tunnel has now been turned into a glorious, brightly-lit avenue leading towards a space filled with a golden light and this, dear reader, is the gateway to the fount of all knowledge, or the entrance, if you prefer, to the new bit of the library into which you can carry your travel cup. No kidding! It has a range of internet access points, complete with leak-proof headphones, desks and chairs which go up and down according to your height and needs, phones from which you can call on a librarian for assistance, study areas with acoustic screens and, best of all, the famous Gladstone shelves, where books are displayed like sweets on a counter and where you can help yourself, a sort of literary pick ’n’ mix, provided everything goes back on the repatriation trolley.
Gladstone was an Oxford man, leaving Christ Church College with a double first and having been a star turn at the Oxford Union debating society. His time as prime minister (he held that position four times before resigning at the age of 84, which leaves President Higgins a mere stripling) was marked by his advocacy of electoral reform and a fairer rent system in Ireland which led his political opponent, Disraeli, to call him God's Only Mistake. Not surprisingly, as a lawyer and later as prime minister, Gladstone had an interest in having an efficient book-shelving system and so devised his own. The idea of mobile aisle shelving – such as was used by The Irish Timesin its Fleet Street location – is to be found one further floor underground in the Bod, but these are such scary 007 spaces of potential torture, with big wheels that, turning, bring the book stacks together and could flatten you, like Flat Stanley, to the thickness of an A4 page. Rolling shelves, they're called and I give them a wide berth.
In the old days, in the Bod, you had to fill in a little green form and wait for the book to be delivered. Now, oh joy unbounded, you walk down the aisle with a bit of paper in your hand searching for your chosen book: in my case the biography of Margery Kempe, a 15th-century traveller who could neither read nor write. And yes, there it is, where it should be. And so you sit in a cheerful, comfortable red armchair, cup of coffee to hand and read. Life can get no better.