Take a look at my label

LIKE labels on expensive clothes, the notices on old library books impress. They impress because the books are out of fashion, rather than in fashion like the clothes.
          I borrowed a book from Swiss Cottage Library Reserve Stock. Inside the cover was stuck a notice as a label St Pancras Library, an old, now-vanished St Pancras Library when St Pancras was a borough of its own. The boroughs of the area---Hampstead, St Pancras, and so on, did not unite to become Camden until  1965.
          The book I borrowed turned out to have labels as interesting as the book, which was first issued in 1949. Sixty-six years ago you could borrow it for 14 days, says the notice.
     Other instructions on the label would have upset the more wayward modern readers. The wording included the demand that you had to keep books clean, and 'refrain from turning down the leaves or making pencil or other marks on them.' You had to protect books in wet weather carrying them from and to the library.
          In cases of infectious disease---this was the time of the polio epidemic---books were forbidden to be returned to the library, but had to be delivered to the sanitary authorities, or to the disinfecting station in Grays in Road, London WC1.
     The old St Pancras borough, being a borough in itself, must have had more than one library. The label inside my book says it came from ' St Pancras temporary south branch library' at 102 Euston Road, NW1. I wonder what's there now. I ought to have a look.
           Many of these references on labels or notices---'temporary', for example---hint at sadness. World War Two bomb damage caused libraries of the time to move to makeshift premises.
          But now the labels live on cosily inside the front covers of the books, deep in Reserve Stock. They and the books are safe.