Long before the Internet, long before the mobile phone, long before streaming and video on demand, there was the book.

As Nancy Cooke, Kent's first county librarian said: "Have you ever felt that terrible boredom of not knowing where to go or what to do? You have longed for some excitement, some romance, for something to happen in your life. When you feel like that, remember the pleasure, the thrill and the happiness that books can give you."

This year Kent is celebrating 100 years of public libraries. But when the service started back in the 1920s, even books were not available to everyone, and it took Miss Cooke to come up with the means of getting books to the people - the mobile library van.

Kent County Council opened its first public library in 1921, using powers granted by the Public Libraries Act of 1919.

All County Councils which adopted the 1919 Act became the library authorities for the whole county with the exception of any towns within the area which had already established a public library under previous library acts.

The initial cost of £3,000 for starting the service was paid for by the Carnegie Trust.

Annie Sybil Cooke (known as Nancy) was Kent's first County Librarian, appointed in November 1921 and given the task of building a library service for Kent's villages.

Although she proved herself to be a redoubtable champion for the library service, she had not been KCC's first choice. They offered the job first to one Duncan Gray - who turned it down.

Nancy Cooke had experience. She had already founded the Gloucestershire County Library service in the challenging period at the end of the First World War when the Spanish Flu pandemic was raging across the globe.

But she later admitted "It was something of an ordeal to arrive in Maidstone, be shown two bare rooms and be told to start…"

Working with one assistant, she classified and catalogued more than 10,000 books in the first year.

By November 1922, there were 6,621 registered borrowers and 22,556 books had been issued in the past six months.

Books were initially despatched to 115 village centres across the county by rail or commercial carrier.

The centres were housed in village halls, schools, Women's Institutes, Workingmen's Clubs, branches of the Co-operative Society and even a Bee-Keeping Association meeting, each with a posse of volunteers who took in the boxes of library books sent out from the KCC offices at Springfield in Maidstone, and lent them on.

It was recorded that each box of 50 volumes normally consisted of 15 to 20 novels, 12 to 15 children's books, and the rest were books on specialist subjects.

In 1924, Miss Cooke commissioned a new innovation: the first purpose-built Kent County Library van.

The library van was made by Lewis Godden, a coach-builder from West Malling, and based on a Vulcan lorry chassis. It was lined with book shelves from which the local volunteer librarians could make their own choice for book exchanges.

The van went into service on December 16 and a year later it had visited 286 Kent villages, travelled 6,000 miles and issued around 55,000 books.

A second van, a Thorneycroft, was added in 1927.

From the early days, a range of local community partnerships were part of the development of the Kent County Library Service.

For example, in 1925, Sandgate Urban District Council provided a library centre and the Kent County Library provided the book stock.

In the late 1920s, the Kent County Library extended its mission to include more urban locations and to support new, more ambitious, branch libraries.

The idea of a purpose-built branch library was seen as radical. The new Ashford Library which opened in 1928 was the first of this type.

But the Kent County Library Service was not solely focussed on basic book supply to library centres.

There was also the Students Library, which posted lending books for educational use to teachers and students, and the Dramatic Library, which circulated sets of plays to drama groups.

Then during the Second World War, the Kent County Library established more than 200 special library centres for military personnel stationed in camps across the county.

Additionally, in 1942, Kent County Library appointed a full time organiser of hospital library services, taking books into hospitals, residential homes and special schools.

Throughout the war, the two library vans continued to visit the county's villages despite enemy aircraft overhead.

In 1943, Nancy Cooke resigned "to work on the land... and produce food for people's bodies instead of handing out food for their minds."

She was succeeded by Miss F R E Davies, formerly the County Librarian of Staffordshire.

After 40 years in makeshift premises, the County Central Library at Springfield was formally opened in August 1964, with an "official opening" on January 16, 1965.

Then with the re-organisation of local government in 1974, Springfield became the HQ for all libraries in Kent, not just the rural branches.

It has since been replaced by the Kent History and Library Centre on James Whatman Way in Maidstone, which is now the HQ for the Kent Libraries, Registration and Archives service.

This glass-fronted building, which opened in 2012, houses Kent’s archives and local history collection together with being the main public library for the Maidstone area.

But the library van service still exists and has recently acquired some new vehicles.

Today, Kent Library Service operates 99 libraries, with five mobile libraries visiting the rural villages.

In many, the offer has expanded to include not just books but music and computer services.

During the pandemic, it expanded still further, offering e-books, e-magazines and newspapers so that readers could use the service remotely.

KCC currently employs 330 library staff who are assisted by more than 1,000 volunteers.

In the year 2020/21, customers borrowed 2,112,900 items.

Books were delivered to 770 housebound customers and 676,900 e-books and e-audiobooks were borrowed by customers, along with 126,300 e-magazines and 868,600 e-newspapers.

This was in the midst of the pandemic, and staff still found time to make 3,500 befriending telephone calls to vulnerable customers

The service has more than 1.3m items in stock that customers can borrow.

And the service is still looking at ways to adapt to the needs of modern society. KCC has just launched a public engagement exercise to help it shape its library strategy in the future.

The county’s residents are being asked for their views on what they think of the library service now and how they would like to see it develop over the next few years.

Cllr Hill said: “Our current strategy runs until the end of 2022, and whether you are a current library user or not, we need your help to develop a new one.

"Our early conversations with library users, residents and partners will be vital in helping to shape Kent library services for the future."

To take part in the consultation, click here.

To learn more about the full range of library services already available, click here.

The consultation closes on February 28, 2022.

And what happened to Nancy Cooke who started it all?

She died in 1971 aged 76 at her home in Kirk Ireton, a village in Derbyshire. She had remained active even in retirement, transcribing 26 books into Braille for the Northern Branch of the National Library for the Blind.

*We are indebted to KCC's Community Historian Rob Illingworth for the research for the above article.