On the Boats Bringing Books to Thousands Who Need Them

University libraries around the world are seeing precipitous declines in the use of the books on their shelves.

Wait! Stop! Before you order that copy of David Benioff's City of Thieves from Amazon (a book I highly recommend), check to see if it's available at your local library. Because free! Oh, I know what you're saying: You don't have time to visit your library's website or load up one of the e-book-borrowing apps (as described in how to get free e-books from your public library) and do all that manual searching.

Wait! Stop! Before you order that copy of David Benioff's City of Thieves from Amazon (a book I highly recommend), check to see if it's available at your local library. Because free! Oh, I know what you're saying: You don't have time to visit your library's website or load up one of the e-book-borrowing apps (as described in how to get free e-books from your public library) and do all that manual searching.

It sounds like something from Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind and his The Cemetery of Forgotten Books: a huge volume containing thousands of summaries of books from 500 years ago, many of which no longer exist. But the real deal has been found in Copenhagen, where it has lain untouched for more than 350 years.

The Libro de los Epítomes was a catalogue for Hernando Colón’s 16th-century collection, which he intended to be the biggest in the world

Years ago, I lived in a remote mountain town that had never had a public library. The town was one of the largest in New York State by area but small in population, with a couple thousand residents spread out over about two hundred square miles. By the time my husband and I moved there, the town had lost most of its economic base—in the nineteenth century it had supported a number of tanneries and mills—and our neighbors were mainly employed seasonally, if at all.

A Tennessee library book that nearly ended up in the trash was sold for a whopping $1,250 when it was found to be a first edition.

A Tennessee library book that nearly ended up in the trash was sold for a whopping $1,250 when it was found to be a first edition. The Friends of the Memphis Public Library book store said the copy of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novella that served as the basis for the film Blade Runner, had been taken off the library shelves and placed in a bin for books to be sold or thrown away.

Every book has to earn its spot in one of the world’s leading public library collections. Here’s what it takes.

“Without a book, so often the child is alone,” says Antonio La Cava. The retired schoolteacher converted his three-wheeled van into a mobile library, the Bibliomotocarro. Driving the hills and mountains of Basilicata, Italy, La Cava is able to reach children in remote villages like San Paolo Albanese, which only has two children of primary school age. “I was strongly worried about growing old in a country of non-readers.” La Cava believes that it’s important to spread the joy of literature to as many children as possible: “carrying out such action has a value, not only social, not only cultural, but has a great ethical meaning.”

Bodleian acquires rare box dated to late 1400s, saying it reveals preoccupation with accessing information on the move is centuries-old

After the decline of feminist bookstores, there's a new trend emerging: mobile, black-owned book operations.

Quentin Roberts doesn’t have to speed-read through books with his 8-year-old son anymore. Yeyco Avila can spend more time with his favorite films. And Faduma Mohamed says she can now rest easy, knowing she doesn’t have to worry about late fees. The St. Paul Public Library system eliminated fines for overdue books and forgave more than $2.5 million in accumulated fees on Jan. 1, after the City Council approved the policy change in December as part of the 2019 budget.

The New York Times weighs in on an Authors Guild survey that shows a "drastic 42% decline in authors' earnings over the past decade. John Scalzi offers some important perspective.

Mirror Image Writing.

It is known as the “fly’s eye Dante”: an 1878 edition of the Divine Comedy which is so small – just 11/4 by 13/4 inches – that it is said to have taken 11 years to print, and to have damaged the eyes of both its compositor and corrector. Bound in red leather embossed with gold, the world’s smallest edition of Dante’s classic poem, which was printed by the Salmin Brothers in Padua, is one of almost 50 officially designated miniature books housed in the London Library.

A pioneering public organisation is taking a stand against the growing problem of homelessness on the West Coast. In so doing, it is re-defining the very idea of a library.

The mobile library bringing books to children in some of Jakarta's poorest neighbourhoods.

The generosity of Minnesotans reaches far and wide, now extending all the way to a library in Iraq. This week, thousands of books arrived at the library at the University of Mosul, a shipment organized by the Minneapolis-based Iraqi and American Reconciliation Project (IARP). The library was destroyed when ISIS militants occupied the city in 2014. The library had stood as a cultural and educational epicenter in Iraq until ISIS fighters demolished the building. They methodically destroyed almost all of the one million books, manuscripts and historic maps inside.