All summer long Hove Library celebrates its centenary, an anniversary in which all of England can take heart. Many in 1908 may have pictured this distant revelry, but to do so four years ago would have tempted fate. Through a bleak winter, residents fended off council plans to shut this Grade II-listed building — a naturally lit country house for everybody, donated by Andrew Carnegie.

Theories about its fate were rife. An article in The Times and an appearance on The Politics Show included Hove in the continuing national alarm that public libraries were being sidelined, their stock dumped. Despite brewers’ objections, Parliament had established public libraries but left implementation to councils, whose reluctance to do so meant that, countrywide, residents prevailed upon Carnegie’s splendid philanthropy.

Come 2004, Hove’s patrons were an unlikely pair: Julie Burchill and the great the Proustian, George Painter. Bright-yellow posters first went up, after dark, in houses near that of the councillor responsible for the terrible proposal; she emerged the next, stormy morning, and her palpable disgruntlement simply inspired residents to festoon another 4,900 house and shop windows with them. (Seen from bus routes, posters become all the more effective.) Children everywhere counted them while politicians, their own posters never so popular, recognised a central issue in a key marginal, and feared counting lost votes.

That outlay of £75 on posters meant that £330,000 was suddenly available for overdue maintenance and a lift, although the question of its books remains unanswered, despite its evident significance. With The Caretaker’s success, Harold Pinter had persuaded his father, for his health, to give up tailoring and, with his wife, move to Hove. Its air sustained them another four decades. Pinter’s mother loved the library. One day she found Fred Uhlman’s novel Reunion and so enjoyed it that Harold not only read it but wrote a screenplay.

Such is the way libraries quietly go about their work. Without razmatazz or gaudy, come-on covers, displayed face on, books can, almost magically, draw in readers — perhaps by a well-judged blurb. (An edition is needed of the hundreds written by T. S. Eliot as a publisher at Faber & Faber.) Alas, Uhlman’s books have been jetissoned by all Brighton and Hove libraries; fiction shelves across the country provide a diminishing sense of discovery, increased schlock and readers (“customers”) are presumed unequal to untrumpeted, serendipitous exploration.

Ask around, however, and hunger for good books is there, if too often disappointed; when satisfied, there is priceless word-of-mouth enthusiasm. Hove’s book supply, meanwhile, is now a “cashback” part of the new Brighton library’s PFI — a byzantine system, difficult to assemble and easily coming adrift.

A lowly £1 per resident is annually spent on books. To increase that total by £50,000 would bring a significant, enduring rebuilding of stock; a minuscule portion of the whole council budget, it is also considerably less than that spent on councillors’ bottled water. To turn on a tap and watch books come out is an economy Andrew Carnegie would relish.