IN Scarborough library, I bought a secondhand book entitled A Librarian’s Odyssey. It has a local connection: a photograph shows the victory parade in 1945 by the River Derwent at Malton and Norton.

The 5th Battalion East Yorkshire Regiment ‘B’ Company commander Major Ken Harrison is pictured saluting smartly. The soldiers and the crowd all look serious: those were austere times.

Ken, a librarian, served seven years in the infantry. “The Snappers” of East Yorks 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.

Even in the war-induced austerity, Britain’s libraries and publishers ensured that soldiers had plenty to read – there were special pocketbooks by Yorkshire’s Herbert Read and General Wavell to sustain spirits. People swapped books or marked favourite bits.

Ken Harrison’s posting in Yorkshire lasted 10 months. He then rose to the top of his profession with Westminster libraries. He died in 2006. Right to the end he was a bookman: he never ceased his reading or his charity work for what is now Bookaid.

In 2019, the 75th anniversary of D-Day is to be commemorated by the creation of a memorial paid for by fines on the banks.

Could not some further confiscated money – for example, from BT’s recent huge fine for the slowness of its service – be put towards rebuilding the national network of staffed libraries smashed by the crash?

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