Vandalism and barbarism continues

This piece by Maggie Gee was first published on Thursday (in The Guardian) and pops up in The Week in Books in today's issue.

Midnight Library raid (read the whole thing)

On Monday morning, between 2am and 3am, when most people were asleep, Brent council sent in a team to remove thousands of books in cardboard boxes from London's Kensal Rise library, which local people, ably backed by household-name writers such as Philip Pullman and Zadie Smith, have been fighting to keep open since November 2010.   [...]


The Kensal Rise pop-up library. Photograph: David Levene

   [...]
However, the library service has never stopped operating. On the day of the closure, after one round of our expensive legal battle was lost on 13 October 2011, we opened our own Kensal Rise Pop-Up Library within the library's perimeter wall.

Apologies for use of excerpts without permission.