At a recent policy and resources meeting, Brighton and Hove City Council evidently felt it had defeated the public, as the doors (temporarily) close on Hove's Carnegie Library this weekend.

Members' views had been expressed in a survey, conducted at great expense, and made it clear they expected books at the heart of the library, with fiction and non-fiction on the ground floor.

Instead, these will be separated by a floor, with music books similarly split up. And non-fiction will also be sidelined.

Where does this leave us?

The comments book at the Jubilee Library was withdrawn after so many people had written remarks such as: "Where are all the books?", which is what people expect from a library.

It is naive to think, simply by providing CDs and DVDs, people will somehow take

out less books.

Many retired people have told me that, no longer preoccupied by work and families, they relish reading.

But they feel let down by a library system which is sidelining books.

And wonderful books are being sold off - a £50 biography of Liszt for 50p and Leonard Woolf's Letters (cost, £30), for 20p.

This isn't weeding, it's ransacking.

Blink and they have been decommissioned - and readers feel the same is being done to them. A significant number of us are being let down.

Boris Norman, the instigator of the Friends of Hove Library, told to me, shortly before he died: "We have won a battle or two but we could still lose the war."

It looks as if he was right.

What's more, at the recent council meeting, an officer said the lift was to be sited where it would be "easy to remove".

Is the long-term plan to close a library which is less used because it has fewer books in it?

How depressing for the staff who have to act on the ill-considered changes at the Carnegie Library.

Their efforts this winter will bring cries of horror when the doors re-open.

By that time, however, the 2007 elections will be looming and the candidates who promise to reverse the library's dumbing down and guarantee its continued existence will secure vital Hove and Portslade votes.

-Christopher Hawtree, Hove