Apparently they’re popping up everywhere. As libraries across Britain are in danger of going the way of the dinosaurs, hungry readers are coming up with their own solution. In one English village, miles from a library, a telephone kiosk has been transformed into a boutique book depository, offering 100 for borrowers to choose from. In London, a private members’ club and boutique hotel called Library opened last year, where cosy sofas and armchairs beneath vertiginous bookshelves entice members to read in an atmosphere not a hundred miles from something Sherlock Holmes would have appreciated. And there are less formal arrangements, such as book drops, where anonymous donors leave books in public places, in the hope that the literary equivalent of a seagull will alight and bear them off. The Tinderbox Cafe in the Merchant City in Glasgow is a good place for such occasional discoveries.

I asked the in-house fulminator why there’s been a sudden resurgence of interest in printed books, since only the day before he’d been remarking on how many more people he now saw on trains and buses with books, rather than e-readers. Was it, I wondered, a form of nostalgia? “No,” he replied, sounding outraged, “it’s because they recognise that the book is an unbeatable piece of technology.” And I think he is right. (As always, of course.) Digital books have their place, and as their application is increasingly refined, they are becoming more amenable to our needs. But they still cannot begin to compete with the medieval format perfected long before most of the world had learned to read. Nor can they be shared or inherited in the same way. Thus, the physical, or ‘real’ book is also a sociable, generous artefact.

I don’t think people’s love of books has changed much in recent years, whether they’re reading digitally or on paper. To some extent, the advent of commercial places boasting bookshelves, such as Library, is style-led, because nothing beats the appearance of a wall of books, and it suits the retro mood of much contemporary design. When an estate agent came to value our flat, we expected to be told that we would have drastically to winnow our collection before anyone would make an offer. Instead, he told us our crammed shelves added character, although perhaps the tower blocks on the floors and behind the doors should be removed, so people could get into the place to look around.

While you can only be cheered by the presence of ad hoc book stalls, as at some enlightened railway and tube stations, and the reminder they bring of reading being in the lifeblood of much of the population, they do not replace libraries. Every few months cutbacks in library services, or the demoting and diminishment of their staff, make headlines. These are swiftly followed by opinion columns, many of them asking if, since books are so cheap, we need libraries anymore. It’s usually the ignorant response of those who never use libraries – and thus do not see how busy they always are – and who think that money can buy anything we lack, whether we’re on a tight budget and using charity shops, or wealthy and buying costly Library of America classics. Quite apart from the obvious fact that far too many people cannot afford to buy food, let alone books, a library is much more than merely a shelf of borrowable titles. It is a repository of knowledge, in countless shapes, many of them irreplaceable, and not available in any other form – or place.

Years ago, one enlightened librarian, the late Joe Hendry, realised that a segment of the reading public never came near Paisley’s public library, where he worked. So, he took books to them instead, installing a shelf in several of the city’s pubs. Soon they were being stamped out faster than the bartender could pull a pint. It was an imaginative idea, and I’ve no doubt today’s librarians are working on other inventive solutions to reach readers who cannot get near them. They could do worse than start by providing the collected works of Shakespeare, although perhaps one line should be treated with caution. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” Polonius advises his son in Hamlet. If libraries had existed in 1599, Shakespeare would surely have re-phrased that line.