IN Scarborough Library, I bought a A Librarian’s Odyssey second hand.

There was a local connection: a postcard photograph shows the victory parade in 1945 by the River Derwent at Malton and Norton.

Fifth Battalion East Yorkshire Regiment ‘B’ Company commander – Major Ken Harrison – salutes smartly.

They, and the crowd, serious: austere times.

Ken – a librarian – served seven years in the infantry. The Snappers of East Yorks, who were part of the 50th Tyne Tees (TT) Division enduring Malta, North Africa, Sicily, Italy - and then D-Day where Ken was wounded on day one but returned and fought all the way almost to Arnhem.

The Snappers and other war weary soldiers of the TT – some Green Howards, Durham Light Infantry – returned to the UK to train less experienced men to carry on. The Army was running out of men.

Even in war austerity Britain’s libraries and publishers ensured that soldiers had plenty to read: raids on Europe but also anthologies of poetry, prose and dramas – in wartime pocketbooks for soldiers by Yorkshire’s Herbert Read and General Wavell – to sustain spirits.

Ken Harrison’s posting in Yorkshire lasted 10 months. From his job in Cheshire he rose near the top of his profession – Westminster Libraries. He died in 2006.

Right to the end he was a book man. He never ceased his reading or his charity work – for what is now Bookaid.

The Memorial to D-Day dead for 2019 – 75 years on – is to be paid for by fines on the banks.

Could not some further confiscated moneys be put towards rebuilding the national network of staffed libraries smashed by the crash?

We salute staff, volunteers and public.

John Dean, Herbert Read of Yorkshire Group, Beadlam, Nawton