1989 Origins - Opening the Book Festival

The origins of reader development lie in work carried out for Sheffield Libraries in the 1980s. Rachel Van Riel and Chris Meade were Community Arts Co-ordinators for the City Council, based in an excellent libraries’ department under the leadership of Pat Coleman. Rachel and Chris built an innovative programme of arts activities in community libraries and began to explore the cultural strengths of libraries which were often then (as now) overlooked.

In 1989 Sheffield Council planned a literature festival. Rachel and Chris were initially not keen – they didn’t want to drop all their community-based work to organise yet another gathering of the literary clans. But they began to discuss why they didn’t like literary festivals and whether it was possible to create something different.

‘What would the literary festival of our dreams be like? It would reach all types of people, cover the broadest range of reading and writing, demystify the processes involving the written word and the reader, examine the role of the literary establishment and its relation to local borrowers and writers, explore the potential of libraries to intervene in the debates about reading and writing, and above all it would make any reader feel confident about what they read – and how they read - and from that basis tempt them to try something new.’
From Chris Meade and Rachel Van Riel, Opening the Book - Report to the Arts Council, 1990.

The Opening the Book Festival of September 1989 changed the face of literary festivals. Popular and literary writers rubbed shoulders for the first time; novelists and poets mingled with football correspondents and writers of soaps, adverts, erotica, screenplays and comics. There were workshops on writing diaries, committee reports and love letters. And there was lots about reading. Jean Binta Breeze ran the first ever workshop on Creative Reading; Barry Hines invited people to bring a book which made them cry or laugh out loud; and every day a different personality chatted about their favourite books and how reading had influenced their lives in a Desert Island Books slot. Many of these ideas have become standard items in festivals since.

The Opening the Book festival began a new relationship between national arts funding bodies and libraries. After a long period in the doldrums, the Literature Department of the Arts Council of Great Britain was experiencing a surge of activity under the leadership of Alastair Niven. There was an openness to new ideas and new partnerships and a wish to reach beyond metropolitan coteries. The Arts Council gave practical help in the form of a grant and many key contacts. Even more importantly, they engaged with the ideas and recognised publicly that libraries and readers were part of the national picture of literature. The Arts Council support of the first library-based literature festival began their superb record of commitment to reader development which has been continued over the fifteen years since.

Following the success of the Festival, the community arts unit changed its name to Opening the Book and all the work in Sheffield was carried out under this banner. The next year, however, Sheffield City Council ran into major financial problems and all services were severely cut back. Pat Coleman had already moved on to lead Birmingham Libraries and Chris Meade followed to a newly created post there (and thence to the Poetry Society and then Booktrust.) Rachel Van Riel went freelance, offering training and consultancy to library and literature organisations. Sheffield Libraries, acknowledging that they were unable to continue the work themselves, agreed that Rachel could take the name she and Chris had coined - Opening the Book – as the name of her new venture.