I was totally amazed when Sue, the owner of my holiday cottage told me about the lending library in the village of All Cannings where she lives. It was a Sunday afternoon and we were pleasantly full after an excellent lunch she had prepared for us. I have been staying in one of her holiday cottages for years now and our little get-togethers have become a kind of tradition when I’m staying with her. Keith, her husband, had gone down to the lake at the back of the converted barn where they live, to help one of the other guests and Sue and I had been having tea and a good natter about all things menopause and other assorted stuff you don’t want men to hear about, when the subject changed to reading. She knows I love books and she asked me if I had bought anything interesting during my stay this time.
There was a time when I bought myself at least the equivalent of a suitcase full of books when I went to England, but that was years ago when you could still buy Penguin paperbacks for 25p. And then there were of course the romantic mysteries we used to love when we were teenagers. The stacks I bought of those taught me a lot about the language so they definitely served their purpose even though they were always read only once and then discarded and passed on to other lovers of romances.
Nowadays I’m a bit more discriminating in my choices and the British book prices have become the same as the Dutch so there is no real reason anymore to bring books from England, but I still love to browse, especially when I’m on my own. Here in Holland I never have so much time to do that at leisure. So after the holidays I still bring home books in pretty large quantities.
When the subject turned to books Sue asked me if I had seen the library in the main street of All Cannings. I must have looked rather puzzled.
“Didn’t you see the telephone box there?” she asked me.
I told her I knew where it was but I had to confess I had seen nothing resembling a library there.
“The phone box is the library,” she said.
“The phone box?” I must have look really stupid.
She nodded. “When it wasn’t used anymore because everyone has a mobile phone nowadays the box itself was left. Nobody had thought of taking it down, or maybe they thought it would look really British in the middle of the village like that. One of the ladies who lives close by thought it a pity that it wasn’t used for anything anymore so she thought it would be a good idea to turn it into some sort of book exchange. You can go and lend books from the box and you can leave books you don’t want anymore. I believe you can even stamp them with the date.”
I know the British can be a bit eccentric now and again, but I’d never heard anything like this before, so the next day I took my camera and inspected the telephone box. It’s a pity I didn’t spot anyone who wanted to bring or take books when I was there. It would have been really nice to learn what people thought of the initiative. Something for the Guinness Book of Records perhaps?
1 comment:
It's so interesting and what an imagation to do such a thing, but it's lovely. How does it work? I mean how can we proceed to have some books so? Myowyn
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