by Lesley Mason

Created on: August 10, 2008

There are moves afoot in the British publishing industry to introduce Age Bands to be prominently displayed on books. This is not an initiative that gains much support among authors, librarians, educators...or indeed readers.

Author Philip Pullman has issued a statement decrying the notion, which has so far received the support of over three and half thousand people, among them over 700 authors. I would like to add my voice to that rejection of an ill-founded attempt at a control that is not required and could only do more harm than good.

Do you remember when you read your first proper grown-up book? Or what it was? Or how old you were?

I've always claimed that mine was "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (later made into the movie Bladerunner) when I was nine or ten years old. It was borrowed from the SciFi shelves of our local branch library on my mam's ticket. As a junior member, I wasn't allowed to take out anything other than children's books. Dad had other ideas.

His greatest gift to his children has been to teach us to love books. It's a gift he commenced by taking our fingers through the one-sentence-per-page Ladybird books, building up words; a gift he expanded by reading a story to us every night when he wasn't working; a gift he gave us the freedom of by enrolling us the library as soon as we could write our own name (the pre-requisite for membership); a gift he enhanced yet further by allowing us to wander the adult section and by breaking the rules to take out those books we really wanted.

Of course we wouldn't have understood everything we read. Big words, and even bigger ideas. But wasn't that the point? We had dictionaries to look up the words, and encyclopaedia to explore the ideas. And every little thing we read made us want to read more...to learn more...explore more.

Thinking about it now, I wonder if I am right about Androids. Was it really my first adult book? By then I had already read "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", "A Christmas Carol", "Don Quixote" (in English translation obviously). Were any of these written specifically as children's books? Or were they just books?

Shortly after Androids would come Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, occasional wanderings into the Rubiyat. This isn't because I was a particularly precocious child. Alongside these classics I was also still reading Tales of Robin Hood, The Secret Seven, even Enid Blyton's "Circus" and "Amelia Jane" series.

Now in my mid-forties I still read with a passion, and just as eclectically,

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