A favourite book of mine is At Home with Books: how booklovers live with and care for their libraries (Thames & Hudson, 1995).
There are converted barns lined with vast volumes, Scottish castles with glass bookcases laden to the ceilings, New York apartments where all living quarters (even the bathrooms) are designed for the multitude of monographs.
The owners offer their views on preservation, how to control bibliomania, and even such painful subjects as weeding the collection. They are what we would expect, wealthy antiquarians in the Classics, erudite translators of French poetry, inheritors of their great-grandfathers' fondness for the folio.
Incongruously on page 208 we are shown into the library of Keith Richards. The librarian in me immediately reaches for the magnifying glass to read the spines in the photographs. Richards has a deep interest in history, in particular the Second World War.
(Librarians keep mental checks of borrowers' reading interests, for future reference and to know how the library is being used. Not that I am expecting Richards to walk into my workplace, he is a Rolling Stone who plays rhythm and blues in deafening stadiums, usually on the other side of the world.)
'Incongruously' only because the public image of Richards as the drug-heightened, whiskey-inspired soul survivor No. 1 is at odds with the conventional image of the regular book-loving inhabitant of the library. Both of these images are misleading and librarians know better than anyone that the library attracts the most unusual and unlikely clientele.
Richards writes, 'When you are growing up, there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully — the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser. As a child, you get to feel all these books are yours.'
All of this came back to me when I read about the promotion of Richards' new autobiography, Life (Little, Brown, 2010). The launch was not in some sleazy nightclub or glamorous rock dive, but at the New York Public Library.
Richards spoke eloquently, revealing that he had originally aspired to be a librarian. He said that the library is the only place around where he willingly obeys the rules. This infers that he is an old-fashioned visitor, used to libraries that have not been turned into chat cafes.
He declared that when he walks into a library he is always made truly aware of civilisation, of something that we