Councillors are considering plans to close Hove Library. Here writer Christopher Hawtree explains why he believes the 97-year-old building must be saved.

"I was totally absorbed in a passion for books," wrote the critic and novelist Walter Allen of the public library, in which, as an adolescent, he spent almost all his spare time.

It "became far more important to me than school . . . On all sides I found books that fascinated me, found them by something like a sense of smell, a gift which good publishers have for manuscripts coming in from the blue, good editors and good critics too ... "

A lifetime's delight, even prosperity, can spring from serendipitous forays in a diligently run public library.

In noting that, to some extent, books can be judged by their cover and tang.

Allen might have added that a book's effect can depend on where it is read. A deckchair on a beach is a far cry from the huddle of a bus shelter in a storm. Public libraries cannot be housed in any old room.

Victorian philanthropy created them, only for them to suffer from that ignoble postwar tradition by which well-loved, convivially staffed institutions saw their resources sacrificed whenever other municipal departments met a shortfall.

Aghast residents and library staff in Hove are now told, with just three weeks' notice, that they could lose their delightful, Grade II listed library - a century after Andrew Carnegie endowed a building acclaimed for its well-directed natural light.

Its contents are to be shunted into town hall gloom, veritable claustrophobia.

Just as Carlyle, when he needed a London Library, set about bringing that splendid institution into existence within a few months, so Hove residents such as Ambrose Spong, HR Knipe and Mrs Tooth pooled their energies to a like purpose.

When the first premises opened in 1892, they boasted a display, lent by a Mr Methley, of a Japanese executioner's sword, a disembowelling knife and sundry assegais.

The residents' efforts were sufficient to prompt Andrew Carnegie to pay for new premises in 1903 and the library has been there ever since.

Its Renaissance-style faade, oak parquet floor (still fine), splendid glass dome and elegant children's room, make for something uncommonly welcoming in a municipal building.

It has served everyday, string-bag demands, such as those of Anthony Burgess who took out novels to quiet his wife while, in a year, he wrote six of his own, including A Clockwork Orange.

And the building has attracted considerable bequests down the years, among them a prized collection by a descendant of John Donne and the second-largest collection of Henry James manuscripts in the country.

Throughout her life, Viscountess Wolseley relished the building, making frequent donations and naming the corporation as her ultimate beneficiary.

Who would do likewise under the current system of local government?

Local concerns come such a long way after those of the monoliths that, across the country, there is a palpable sense that we have reached the end of community.

To move the library to an unsuitable town hall would cost rather more than to maintain the present building properly and to install in it a lift (as envisaged by the architect, who left space for one in the stairwell).

Hove Town Hall is described in Pevsner's Sussex as "so red, so Gothic, so hard, so imperishable". On the contrary, it shared the curious fate of other notable local buildings, burning down in 1966.

Its replacement is another Sixties bunker. A so-called banqueting room is the library's proposed perch.

Not only a piquant twist upon "no eating in the library", this would oust blood donors and all those who are now charged commercial rates to hire a room for such things as ballroom dancing, which do not need the natural light it so lacks.

Partitioned, it would be all the more ad hoc and quite inadequate for the archives and notable runs of magazines.

This wayward logic is now typical of a neighbourhood in which flowerbeds are grassed over and the only way in which to fund a sports centre is apparently to build several 38-storey blocks of flats.

Civic management, the obverse of Empire, was a task relished by the Victorians, who understood that a good life takes a pride in the seemingly mundane.

They called the senior functionary a town clerk, not a chief executive.

Today, local government, needlessly craving glamour, seems besotted by hi-tech equipment, forgetting that computers, like television, will soon be within every family's reach.

Yet as people live in smaller and smaller houses, they have less and less space for books.

Libraries are needed more than ever. To master a book can create a more astute and individual mind than all of Google's gobbets.

Meanwhile, in pacific Hove, one resident remarked: "I'm beginning to think that we could find a new use for Mr Methley's disembowelling knife." And he's a barrister.

Christopher Hawtree is an authority on Graham Greene and has edited his letters plus an anthology from the magazine Night And Day.

He has also compiled a Literary Companion To Dogs and contributes articles to national newspapers. He lives in Westbourne Gardens.