The community organisation for which I volunteer is based in a library. We also work closely with another librarian. I always respected librarians, obviously, for being Keepers of the Books… But honestly? Working alongside them has given me such intense respect for them.

Yeah, okay, surveillance-free information is boss as and I’m not devaluing that. But I also want to point out that librarians are the literal best at building communities, at putting people in contact with others in ways beneficial to both, and at making sure as few people as possible slip through the cracks.

Our librarians (in the UK as a whole) are a defence force between the poor and the government; I can’t even begin to count how many people have been able to apply for benefits they desperately needed to survive, thanks to libraries… But also thanks to librarians. The organisation for which I volunteer is trying to build communities across an underprivileged area; the vast majority of our adult attendants were frogmarched in by the head librarian, and she has literally never brought us someone who wasn’t looking for something like us.

We run a fibre arts group locally, and so what do they do? They watch for people checking out crochet and knitting books and then bring them to us, or hand them a leaflet for the group. They hang our posters and hand out our flyers.

I would die for our librarians, and of course they are definitely and indisputably the best librarians… But throughout my life wandering far and away and using libraries in a variety of countries and at various levels of dirt-poverty, I have noticed that quite an enormous proportion of librarians are definitely and indisputably the best librarians.

Libraries are a bulwark against capitalism.