ON the last day of April 1954, Glasgow’s venerable Royal Exchange Building began a new chapter when it reopened as Stirling’s Library and the Commercial Library, which had both previously been housed in nearby Miller Street.

The building had been acquired by Glasgow Corporation for £105,000 in 1949 and had been altered and redecorated at a cost of £41,700. The huge general library contained reference books on almost every subject; the magazine room, furnished in light Japanese oak, offered some 150 periodicals; there were 1,000 volumes on the pictorial arts alone, and some 3,000 in the music section. The former Cranston’s tea-room was now occupied by the commercial library.

The library was opened by Lord Provost Thomas A Kerr, who could not resist a few choice words. He said that the public were not reading the same quality of literature as they did when he was a boy. “You may be reading more,” he declared, “but I do not think you are reading the right stuff.”

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He had often thought it would be a great joy to read again “for the first time” such books as The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, Redgauntlet, Lorna Doone, and some of Dickens’s works.

While he was not condemning anyone, he had the feeling that the arrival of radio, and that “soul-destroying, anti-social abomination”, television, had affected reading standards.