In my nearest tube station, there used to be a book-swap in the entrance, which I used to love for the sheer speed of uptake. You could drop any old random nonsense there in the morning and, by the time you came home in the evening, it would be gone. Once, I left an anthology of short plays from 1976. It wasn’t a particularly special year for plays, and not one of them was by anyone you’d have heard of – but by the time I got on the tube, someone in my carriage was reading it.
As satisfying as that was, I could hardly call it a huge part of my life. So when the little exchange libraries vanished overnight, I was nothing like as outraged as a lot of people I know, who blamed, variously: health and safety gone mad; Sadiq Khan (and, fair play, I guess he is the only person you could name from Transport for London, but it feels unlikely that his was the deciding vote); philistinism; modernity. What on earth could have prompted this barbaric act?
