How to… Survive a trip to the Library

Here’s the step-by-step guide on how to use UEA’s Library, courtesy of resident hater Adam Edge.


As an English Lit student I’m expected to live in the library, orgasmically rubbing myself all over with volumes of Jane Austen and Dostoyevsky like a pig rolling in its own faeces.

To be honest, I couldn’t hate it more; it’s one of the worst places on earth, next to Guantanamo Bay and Prince of Wales post-4am. And don’t get me started on the people that think sitting within its confines all night with a MacBook justifies a day spent doing sweet FA.

So, anyway, you’ve got a seminar at 11 and you haven’t done the set reading – not even looked it up on Wikipedia like you’d usually do, you monster – and you need to have a copy of the book with you so you can pretend to the rest of your seminar group that you’re fundamentally the second, uncredited writer of the book and there needs to be no other authority.

Part of the act is having the essential unread prop sitting on the table before you while you reel off bullshit about its not-glanced-at pages in order to fulfil your life goal of scraping a pass when you graduate. The time’s-a-tickin’, the seminar at 11 is coming over the hill like a bad song from The Automatic, and without the money to buy a copy from the on-campus Waterstones (because you pissed away your weekly budget on a night out that ended with you expelling so much sick that you could successfully take a job as a human volcano) you head to the Library to grab the book, free of charge, all in the nick of time. Along the way you’ll lose your humanity, dignity and self-respect, but, more importantly, you’ll discover yourself…

1. Choose A Door

Decisions, decisions…

Your first hurdle comes before you even enter the Library: which method of entry will you choose? There’s the normal door, but there’s also the rotating door thing which your inner child desperately wants you to run into. I went for the rotating door – and regretted it instantly. What would take mere seconds to walk through a normal door takes at least half a minute walking around this circular conveyor belt of disappointment. Choose the normal door; save yourself the aggro.

2. Check Your Card

A helpful, if tiny, reference point we found on the UEA website.

You’re in the Library. Now you need to get past what can only be described as UEA’s answer to UK Border Force. Confronted by some indoor gates, you must work out access. You take on the role of Moses and walk into the gates, expecting them to part like the Red Sea… They’re not opening? Use your Campus Card, you blithering buffoon. But it’s not working? Turn it the other way round and move on.

3. The Hobbit: An Unexpectedly Infinite Staircase

Only the beginning of your journey…

The quest has only just begun, but the physical strain on your body is imminent. Welcome to the stairs, the never-ending stairs, that go on and on like an MC Escher painting. There was a queue at the lift so you took the stairs because, hey, it’s only a few steps. How much do you regret that now? A cruel twist of fate means the book you need is right on the top floor and after the first flight of stairs you’re seriously considering stopping for water and sleep. Oddly, at the top of each staircase is someone talking into their phone; they mark your journey like Cheerios would on a walk into the woods. When you reach the top, you’ve hiked the equivalent of Everest without the respect one would gain from doing so. Nobody’s going to name a child after you, and no one will remember you.

4. Let’s Get This Book!

The book you need is located within some arbitrary combination of letters and numbers; you find the correctly labelled aisle and start looking. You start at the top of the bookcase and slowly move your head left to right, all the while whatever enthusiasm you’ve built up is slipping away as fast as François Hollande’s marriage (satire!). It soon becomes apparent that the book you need isn’t there. It’s not on that shelf, or that shelf. The reference is definitely what you wrote down, so where the fuck is it? You start doubting yourself. Maybe I wrote the reference down wrong? You begin to wander around the aisles in a vain hope that the book you need will launch itself at you.

5. Let’s Get This Book Part II: The Less Enthusiastic Sequel

You’ve been wandering about for half an hour now both caffeine and sleep deprived and you still haven’t got that book. You think about asking someone for help and then remember that you’re studying for a degree at a top 20 university. If you can’t use a library who’s going to employ your dole-queue-destined ass? You meander on, the sense of uncertainty that the book you’re looking for was even written is now at an all-time-high.

6. Seriously, Where Is It?

You’re on your hands and knees, begging the sky gods for mercy and a means of finding this book. Suddenly, your tears that have fallen onto the carpet crudely align themselves into an arrow – pointing just ahead of you, a bookcase labelled “It’s here, you tosser”. You scramble to your feet and your eyes start darting across the wall of books… And you’ve found it. Well done. You can now use the Dewey Decimal System with less efficiency than a tortoise finishing the London Marathon.

7. Checking Out

Back to Floor Zero you go…

Having the book in your hands, and not being quite sure if you’re dreaming, you run down the flights of stairs and begin your walk to freedom. Now you need to put this book through checkout and high tail outta this dive UEA calls a library. Just throw it in the hatch. Pick it back up and run for the doors.

8. And It’s Finally Over

You stagger out of the Library doors like Tom Hanks coming out of the sewer pipe at the end of The Shawshank Redemption, having missed the seminar your originally went in there to get a book for by weeks. Was it worth it? Well, the psychological scarring will be with you for life but at least you made it out. Why anyone would want to stray from the confines of their room, and bed, in order to “do work” in the Library remains an unsolved mystery… But at least you know your way around now.