The British Library's new fantasy exhibition opened my eyes to how important fantasy is

This might sound strange but I always worry about seeing things I love in the spotlight, because I worry they won’t be taken seriously and all the feelings I have for them will be undermined. I don’t like exposing a vulnerable side of myself to potential ridicule, basically. I’ve had enough of that from the “oh that’s unusual” remarks people have made about my job over the years. So I worried, visiting the new fantasy exhibition at the British Library – Fantasy: Realms of the Imagination it’s called – about how fantasy would come across.

I love fantasy, you see. I’ve loved it ever since I was little and I read a story about a boy who discovered a city at the bottom of a lake. He’d been hearing it call to him in his sleep or something, and one day he dived and found it. Everything about this took me by surprise. I didn’t know books could do that, veer off from reality like that. I can almost feel my mind stretching to take it all in still. And that book, it fired something within me that remained ever since.

But fantasy has always been a relatively private thing for me, because growing up, I didn’t really know anyone else who was into it. My family wasn’t. OK, granted, I had my dad’s Hobbit book and his The Lord of the Rings, but I’d never seen him go anywhere near them, nor near any other kind of fantasy. He read biographies. And my friends weren’t into fantasy, despite my best efforts. Even when I joined Eurogamer many years ago, there was no one interested in it, though that’s changed now. So I learnt to keep it to myself. I kept it secret, kept it safe.

Given that, I didn’t expect to see many people at this fantasy exhibition, because I didn’t think that many people were into it. And I know how ridiculous that sounds – I know there are some fantasy licences you don’t even have to have read a book to enjoy today. I also didn’t think fantasy was something serious enough to have in the British Library, because it’s got elves and goblins and magic and dragons in it. It’s the silly stories Bertie likes. Who’s going to see a silly thing like that?’

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Imagine my face when I walk into the exhibition, then, and there are many other people there. It’s really popular. And it’s not just people like me: there are younger people, older people, Black people, white people, and they’re all peering into perspex cases very seriously like they would at a proper exhibition about proper things. And that’s when the first wave of realisation hits me: this a proper exhibition about a proper thing. I wobble.