Lost worlds. (Argus).(modernizing libraries)(Brief Article)

Always in the vanguard of progressive library policy, the Central Public Library in Ghasthurst naturally has no books. When, several years ago, the library's collection was declared irrelevant to an age of electronic information technology, the more handsomely bound Volumes were disposed of by the yard to interior decorators for the adornment of the homes of property developers and other moneyed but bookless clients. The rest were "recycled" for an enormous papier mache statue of a banana in a pyjama, commissioned for the foyer with a view to making the library more "kid-friendly". Not a page was wasted.

But if Ghasthurst has disposed of its books in an ordered way--unlike, say, the University of Western Sydney which earlier this year dumped and buried 10,000 of its--it has also managed, unfortunately in a less orderly fashion, to dispose of its local branch libraries. In the mid-1990s, reductions in funding decreed by the philistine members of the city council's (then) Liberal-dominated library committee led to the amalgamation of the library's suburban branches with what the committee's report called "aligned institutions". The biggest branch, Ghasthurst Meadows, found itself sharing accommodation with a Post Office Shop, where library-users searched vainly for the book they wanted among racks of greeting cards and prepaid envelopes, until much of the surviving collection was inadvertently included in a bulk mail-out of publicity leaflets for a mobile telephone company and never recovered. West Ghasthurst was amalgamated with an amusement arcade, a large notice enjoining silence placed above its one graffiti-daubed bookcase as redundant amid the cacophony of video games and baseball-capped truants swearing at each other as the books the case contained. Within a month the branch was closed by judicial order after police reported drug dealing on the premises and mistakenly arrested the octogenarian life president of the Library Users' Association, Mr J. G. W. Meiklejohn CMG, and his wife Thelma who had gone to inspect the branch and were reaching for their Bex powders in shock. Salmonella Park (North Ghasthurst) was relocated to an Ol' Colonel Greazy's Home-Fried Fast-Frozen Takeaway Chickenburger outlet, but before long closed for lack of stock, those few books not spattered with sunflower oil having been minced, fried and served to customers (the taste of the volumes when cooked was ...