“There was something there worth going to,” said ‘Nathan,’ mid-50s. And yet, as important a place mental challenges. Moreover, talking, an activity that can be fraught with anxiety, is discouraged in your traditional library. Call it the reassurance of the expected “shsssush!”
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It’s the sense, says Brewster, that “you couldn’t be challenged, that you didn’t have to give a reason for being there.” (It’s the sort of right that Brewster, citing other researchers, refers to as “the freedom to tarry.”) Add in the fact that the plentiful supply of books and magazines, free for the perusing, represented a panoply of choice with no attendant pressure. ‘Isaac,’ early 40s, had trouble at home deciding what to put on the TV, a struggle that made him reluctant to helm the family remote control. But at the library, “I could go, make choices, they didn’t have much consequence, because if I didn’t like the books I could just bring them back again.”

That abundance had a way, it seems, of providing focus for those for whom achieving it can otherwise be a challenge. ‘Alfie,’ late 40s and unemployed said, “It concentrates the mind — Oh, you feel you’re a different person.”

Her research, says Brewster doesn’t have implications merely for the study of mental health. Nor even of spaces. Her work, she says, suggests that we need to broaden our minds when we consider the value of public libraries, and the levels of public funding we put to them. She points to a push in the U.K. toward cost-cutting measures that challenge the standing of the library building, like the sharing of services via digitally networked local libraries. “It’s all driven by,” says Brewster, “‘that libraries are just the books.’” But they’ve never been about just that.