Hailing from the suburbs of Gloucester, Mr Giddy had an unusual route to becoming the college’s sole librarian, but with his vast knowledge of books and apparently ghostly abilities, there is clearly no man better for the job.
Inquiring about Mr Giddy’s background, I found that, rather unexpectedly, he had studied countryside management at university. “I originally thought I’d do something like a park ranger, managing wildlife reserves. But as often happens, that didn’t work out (laughter)”. He has not lost this love of nature however, as he continues to “get out into the wild” and bike and hike in his spare time.
“So why did you become a librarian?” I ask, imagining becoming a farmer would be the next best option, and a librarian very near the last. “Basically, about twenty years ago, I was looking for a job and I got into Bradford council working for public libraries. I had a good bit of experience in retail and customer service, so got a part-time job with the Bradford council, and ended up running a couple of community libraries… then moved to Bradford University libraries for a bit, and then Notre Dame.”
He explains he’d “always enjoyed reading” but contrary to the stereotype, he says he’s not “a massive sort of reader, reading all the time like that” but he “always went to the library as a child and throughout my life, you know, I think that's probably why I got into it as a job as I’ve thought, well, let’s see if I can get a job in in that sector.”
Me and my friends (and many others, surely) assumed reading was a major part of his role as librarian, and he too agrees that would be very pleasant, but he says “that’s the thing with the job, it's one of these jobs that, even with people who I know quite well here and are very supportive don't really know what I do. All the especially tedious kind of stuff you have to do, for example! I think back in the day, decades ago maybe you could spend a bit of your time reading the books but not so much now”.
Looking to better understand this enigma of being a librarian, I asked what’s his favourite part of the job, to which he replied “I think it would be when I get the opportunity to help a student with a complex query or when they want to find something out, like accessing a journal, a book, or when they’re asking ‘can you help me with this?’ and it’s something you and them might go back to later that day or even a couple of days, so they can move on with their studies or interests. So I think it’s having that one-to-one help with somebody to improve whatever it is they want to do and get them that information.”
I then obviously have to know what’s his least favourite part of the job, already intrigued that the job is in fact, not just reading books nor monotonous in the slightest, to which he replies “I think between break time and about two o'clock when it's really busy, so you have less scope to do less interesting things, and there is more “crowd control” when the place gets very full”.
And coming as a great shock to anyone who keeps up with Outlook or regularly frequents to library, he says “And it might come as a shock to some people, but what I don’t really like is telling people to be quiet, because it is something you just have to do as part of the job, to maintain that silent study environment, as we have this one big room where you can hear everyone – but it needs to be done!”
Mr Giddy can often be seen clicking away at his computer, but besides ordering books, he says “A lot of the time you’d be emailing other staff or students about things. There can be a fair few queries sent that way. I think because I tend to flip between one thing and another all the time, it is difficult to put it into words. You’re being communicated with and you’re assessing resources. I mean, a lot of the time it’s looking at the library database itself, working out if someone’s reserved a book, what’s happened to something that’s gone missing, or approving EPQ students for access to the university libraries. What can also happen is you might be investigating something, then you'll find out someone hasn't brought back a book for six months and then that leads to another thing or task so I'm constantly shifting. Then there will be other things I’m involved in like the library’s plan for the year, delivering a library talk in a class, managing the work of student volunteers or at meetings with staff.”
No two days running the library are the same, especially considering he runs the entire library department himself but, in the holidays, when he still has work to do, he plays music and gets what he needs to do done. Even in term time however, the library isn’t exactly a silent place with the constant movement shuffling of chairs and such as students enter and leave the library at all times of the day.
Moving to a more spontaneous series of questions, I ask Mr Giddy a few student-nominated questions, beginning with something befitting of the last holiday season, ‘Are you a ghost?’ prompted by his apparent teleportation abilities. Slightly taken aback but not at all offended, he says “One thing that might explains this is that there is a back corridor between the library, English and the lecture theatre which English students use as well. Through that door near the fiction shelves, you can get from the library to science in about one minute - that might be why, but I can't really fully explain why people might think I can teleport!”. Apparently, there’s some other short-cut to Cuvilly too, but I decided to stop with the hidden Notre Dame lore before this turned into an exposé (maybe next time!).
Returning to the books, I ask Mr Giddy about his favourite book, to which he says ‘Lord of the Rings’ as he quite likes fantasy and sci-fi, and says it was something he read when he was the age of the students here. He’s recently been revisiting ‘Dune’ too, another sci-fi, fantasy book to have a fresh comparison to the movies that have come out recently. Away from those genres, he also quite likes ‘The Road’ by Cormac McCarthy, explaining that it is “post-apocalyptic” and “It’s really bleak and kind of depressing but very poetic at the same time”, but recommends ‘Lord of the Rings’ for those more interested in classics. It was refreshing to hear the words ‘post-apocalyptic’ without ‘Brave New World’ or ‘1984’ attached to them, so I wanted to know more about his thoughts on the dystopian literature genre, and was not disappointed by the range of books unique books he’d read such as ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and ‘Fahrenheit 451’ which are definitely classics in their own right. The most standout one he mentioned was “This book called ‘The Death of Grass’ by John Christopher about crops failing and there was something real about it rather than the “nuclear war” ones, you know, which are sometimes a bit far-fetched. So yeah, your kind of question why you like this [genre]. I think it’s just how people react, isn't it? You know, when society is sort reduced to nothing.”
Prior to the interview, I’d requested a Winter reading list to finish off the interview with a festive feel and as a present for the readers, but I foolishly did not expect a librarian to give me a list of 15+ books… so the full list will be given at the end!
The first book on the list that caught my attention is ‘Together We Will Go’ by J. Michael Straczynski which is about suicide and “set in the present day, basically about people who meet up, and they get a bus and it's kind of like a sort of journey of the last days of their lives, you know, before they do what they need to do, but it's the way it’s written is not depressing. It's difficult to describe it. I would say there was this one character and wasn’t sure why they went through with it, but overall, I think it was a very interesting, different sort of book to read”, which Mr Giddy adds he was pretty reluctant to read at first. Next there’s ‘The Psychopath Test’ which is a fiction by John Ronson that’s “basically trying to work out what a psychopath is, so it’s a bit convoluted. There was some kind of a book that was made, some sort of a puzzle that he received and he investigating that. It's a bit like Louis Theroux investigative journalism but going round interviewing various people across the world who are trying to work out if this person or these people have psychopathic tendencies so it's definitely a book to read rather than say so much”. Finally, there’s the non-fiction ‘Cosmos’ by renowned astronomer Carl Sagan that’s “quite an accessible book”, but as a non-physicist, Mr Giddy feels that reading non-fiction science books “you feel like you understand it when you're reading it” but “once you finish reading it's like ‘What was that talking about?’” – a very relatable experience to us students doing supercurricular reading.
Mr Giddy's Reading List
Fiction
- Arthur C Clarke - Songs of Distant Earth
- Jack Kerouac - On the Road
- Robert Louis Stevenson - Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
- J. Michael Straczynski - Together We Will Go
- Ursula Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness
- Douglas Copeland - Generation X
- Stanislaw Lem - Solaris
- Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol
- Brandon Sanderson - The Final Empire
- Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination
- Margaret Attwood - The Handmaids Tale
- Kim Stanley Robinson - The Years of Rice and Salt
- Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Non-Fiction
- Robert McFarlane - The Old Ways
- Jon Ronson - The Psychopath Test
- Carl Sagan - Cosmos
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