NONE of the volumes which were on the shelves for public use when Park Library opened remain.

They have long since been, as library manager Caroline Blake puts it, read to shreds by thousands of eager library users.

Records of what the library users of the early Beatles era were borrowing are also scanty. There was no Public Lending Right Record service in those days, so statistics are hard to come by. Proper records have only been kept since 1987.

From then until the end of last year, the late Dame Catherine Cookson enjoyed a 17-year reign as queen of the libraries, with more Cookson books borrowed than those of any other author.

However, her tales of working class northern life in the late 19th and early 20th century have now been supplanted in the charts by children's author Jacqueline Wilson, who has won millions of fans with stories dealing with often traumatic issues from a child's perspective.

In 1964, it was a different story, although not all that different, if surviving library records are to be believed.

Historical dramas and romances were still at the top of the library tree, but their characters were not the artisans and servant girls of Cookson's world. Instead, they were the kings and queens who sprang from the pen of Jean Plaidy, and the Regency ladies and gentlemen who inhabited the imagination of Georgette Heyer.

Meanwhile, Agatha Christie's career as the queen of crime fiction was at a height which would barely be altered by her death a dozen years later.

Book-loving children in those days were preoccupied with the activities of a young boy in a boarding school, just as they are now. The only difference was that rather than being called Harry Potter and wielding a wand, he was called Jennings and wielded ink pellets and conkers in the works of Anthony Buckeridge.