Chegando de camelo em áreas remotas da Mongólia ou em barco ao longo da costa da Noruega, bibliotecas contemporâneos são frequentemente móveis, criativo e voltado para a comunidade, e estão se adaptando ao invés de desbotamento com a ascensão de livros eletrónicos e diminuição nos orçamentos.
The Mongolian Children’s Mobile Library carried by camel to nomadic herding communities and remote parts of the Gobi desert. (photo by Jambyn Dashdondog/Mongolian Children’s Culture Foundation/Go Help, all images courtesy University of Chicago Press)
“Librarians have a long history of overcoming geographic, economic, and political challenges to bring the written word to an eager audience, they continue to live up to that reputation today, despite the rapid, sweeping changes in how we read and share books in the 21st century,” Johnson writes in an introduction. He also emphasizes that “[t]he vast majority of the smaller libraries in this book owe their existence to a single person, a ‘librarian’ with an unstoppable vision.”
Artist and activist Raúl Lemesoff drives the streets of Argentina in his “Weapon of Mass Instruction,” a 1979 Ford Falcon converted to look like an armored tank sheathed in bookshelves. In Colombia, school teacher Luis Soriana started Biblioburro and travels to rural areas with two donkeys named Alfa and Beto. And for two decades now Jambyn Dashdondog has been riding a camel (and sometimes a horse, cow, or reindeer) to remote regions of Mongolia as part of his Mongolian Children’s Mobile Library. Before all of them, Johnson notes, Mary Titcomb of the Washington County Free Library in Maryland started a horse-drawn library program in 1905, one of the first “animal libraries” to rely on a furry collaborator for affordable transportation on uneven ground.
Weapon of Mass Instruction by activist and artist Raúl Lemesoff in Buenos Aires (photo by Guillermo Turin/Secretaría de Cultura y Educación, Municipalidad de Rosario)
The Mobile Art Library by PRODUCTORA that drives around Mexico City ‘Improbable Libraries’ (photo of the book for Hyperallergic)
The Bookbike operated by Pima County Public Library in Tucscon, Arizona (courtesy Pima County Communications Dept.)
A home library designed by Travis Price for Wade Davis in Washington, DC ‘Improbable Libraries’ (photo of the book for Hyperallergic)
The People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street in New York, set up in 2011 (photo by David Shankbone)
Library with a bamboo dome designed by 24H>architecture at Soneva Kiri resort in Koh Kood, Thailand (photo by Boris Zeisser/24H>architecture)
Didier Muller’s “Librairie Urbaine” installation of suspended cabins for books (photo by Didier Muller/House Work)
Think Differently Book Exchange, part of the Gap Filler initiative in Canterbury, New Zealand, after the 2010 earthquake (photo by Hannah Airey/Gap Filler)
Portuguese artist Marta Wengorovius’s “One, Two, Many” project designed with Francisco Aires Mateus, where a mobile library holds 60 books with reading space for one (courtesy Marta Wengorovius/João Wengorovius)
An outpost of Little Free Libraries in an Iowa park (courtesy Little Free Library)
New library wing attached to a former rail station in Luckenwalde, Germany (photo by Andreas Meichsner/ff-Architekten)
A library for deaf children in Muyinga, northern Burundi (courtesy BC architects)
University of Aberdeen library (photo by Adam Mork)
A library on Bondi Beach, Sydney, created by IKEA (courtesy One Green Bean)
