The borrowers

Close friend and regular visitor to these pages Peter the Flautist (aka Dark Puss) tells me that he has tried in three libraries to get hold of a copy of They Came Like Swallows but without success, so he won't be taking part in this month's book group read. Before I go on I must say that I do have Peter's permission to write about him here, and I sought that as I thought library use might be an interesting subject to explore.

Peter can be our model "borrower" since he prefers to borrow rather than buy books in order to support his local libraries and help to keep them going, and his motives are altruistic and to be commended because he feels that while he can obtain books from many sources, other people cannot and rely heavily on the libraries for their reading matter. I wonder if Peter's level of library use - relative to his book-buying - is unusually high, and I'm inviting him to expand on this in a comment if he cares to.

We visited our local library a great deal when our children were younger as they got through many more books than we could reasonably buy for them. I found the adults' section quite disappointing - certainly in terms of fiction - athough non-fiction was more interesting. I can't claim to share Peter's admirable social conscience on this; I would use the library for reference purposes or to find something that wasn't easily obtainable in the shops, but the vast bulk of my reading is books I have bought (or been given), thus I am a buyer rather than a borrower.

I checked the catalogue of Edinburgh city libraries to see how well they would do on providing our book group titles and the results were: "All Passion Spent" - nil, "They came like swallows" - one, "Alias Grace" - too many to count. I have no idea how libraries determine their acquisition policy - is it based on supply and demand, or vice versa? - but the findings of that very basic straw poll were interesting.

So, my questions to all you avid readers are: do you use libraries regularly and if so, for what? Would you never buy a book if you could get it at the library? Does that apply equally to fiction and non-fiction? Is it or isn't it important to keep the books we've read and loved or might want to refer to again? Given constraints of space for housing books and /or cash for buying them, what determines what - if anything - we buy?