Protest at removal of books in library

LETTER - I couldn't believe it. Oswestry Library no longer stocks encyclopedias. Before the refurbishment, it had both the Encyclopedia Britannia and the World Encyclopedia, the latter beautifully printed and in some respects the better of the two.

The librarian told me that encyclopedias were "old fashioned" (tantamount to saying that books were passe, old hat) and I'd have to go online.

Well call me a Luddite if you like (I had an IT bypass yonks ago) but at 68 I've no desire to tangle with new technology.

One of the reasons many graduates are poor at grammar, spelling and punctuation is because they don't read books enough. The beauty of a reference book is that when looking up a subject invariably something else of interest catches your attention.

I presume online you just get what you ask for. The printed book is one of the greatest and most civilised of all inventions. Words on paper are a wonderful information storage, retrieval, distribution and consumer product.

Imagine if we had been getting our information delivered digitally to our screens for the past 550 years.

Then some modern Gutenberg or Caxton had come up with a technology that was able to transfer these words and pictures onto pages that could be delivered to our doorstep.

We would be thrilled with this technological leap.

I urge all people in the Oswestry area who enjoy consulting and browsing in encyclopedias to protest at the needless, reactionary withdrawal of an important facility.

Sidney Evans,

Chirk