In March 1893, Gladstone was in Brighton.

The then prime minister wrote about a Mr MacCurran, "an individual now in confinement" who "made his way, unimpeded, to the window of my Brougham with a loaded pistol for the purpose of dispatching me. At the last moment, he relented & abstained on account of observing, or thinking he observed in me, a likeness to his father".

Gladstone's sanguine manner derived from a love of books. He enjoyed sorting them out and was translating Horace's Odes at this busy time.

As such, he would have enjoyed going across to Hove's Carnegie Library had it been built then. His comments would have been welcome - but more so now.

Overlooked in the biographies of him by Roy Jenkins and Richard Shannon, was an essay of his "On Books And The Housing Of Them", elegantly described by Anne Fadiman in her beguiling 1998 volume of bookish essays, Ex Libris.

By Gladstone's calculations, a room 20 by 40 feet could readily contain 20,000 books. (He also invented the idea of rolling stacks, which doubled that).

A man so alert to the use of space and time, he would be aghast to think that in Hove, as has happened in Brighton, books are losing out to library space.

He understood readers relish as many books as possible. He would be perturbed that, in Hove, a couple of small, little-used sofas take up the space that, by his calculations, could contain thousands of books.

Let us hope the recent decision by the policy and resources committee to defer all this for discussion means considerably more thought will be given to the ingenuity with which this splendid building can be used. What could be more sustainable than that?

-Christopher Hawtree, Hove