He might be almost 90 but Ray Bradbury's quest to save US public libraries rolls on, with the author appearing last Saturday at an event in California to raise money for a library in trouble.

The HP Wright library in Ventura is threatened with closure due to cuts in public funding, unless it raises $280,000 (£171,000) by next March. Bradbury's event was the first in a year-long series of author appearances designed to help keep the 44-year-old library open. The $25 (£15) ticket offered patrons the chance to hear a talk from the author of Fahrenheit 451, as well as see a screening of The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, a film based on one of his short stories.

Bradbury said that he had spoken at all of California's 200-odd libraries. "I have a wheelchair, so they carry me to the car, and they throw me in the car, and throw me in the library, and they sell books and they keep all the money. I talk free, to make money for them so they can continue," he told the New York Times. "All libraries are special."

Although the 88-year-old Bradbury is vehemently anti-internet – it's "a big distraction ... It's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere," he told the Times – he is very much pro-library. "Libraries raised me. I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years," he said. "I read everything in the library. I read everything. I took out 10 books a week so I had a couple of hundred books a year I read, on literature, poetry, plays, and I read all the great short stories, hundreds of them. I graduated from the library when I was 28 years old. That library educated me, not the college."