Thursday, March 28

Street libraries arrive in Badajoz with spring


With spring, books will bloom and it is that in five city parks booths will be installed where anyone can grab the title that most appeals to them and read it while waiting for the sunset from the Alcazaba, making a stop on their walk through the park from the river, have a beer in San Francisco or watch your children on the swings in the Parques de las Américas or San Fernando.

Two years after SOS Casco Antiguo put the street library project on the table of the Badajoz City Council and Provincial Council, the initiative is going ahead and it is being done with the push of the CB Foundation, which is the one who has defrayed the cost of the booths and the efforts of Carlos Díaz, the owner of the churrería ‘aAaaa’ in Moreno Zancudo, who will donate the books from his private library to fill the street shelves.

The date chosen for the book stands to go out into the street will be the first week of April and the places to place them are still pending confirmation, although the proposal of SOS Casco Antiguo was well received by the Department of Culture. These places would be the Alcazaba, the river park, San Francisco and the parks of the Americas and San Fernando.

These are the booths that will be placed in the parks, which will be decorated by artists from Badajoz. /

Today

In each of these street libraries there are two shelves with capacity for fifty books each, but the offer will be live, since what this initiative is about is that people can take the books, return them or leave others that have forgotten at home or want to share with people.

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And it is that in this invitation to street reading, to look up from Facebook and open a book in a park, there are no rules beyond civility. Anyone can take the book that they most suggest to read it on the spot, take it home and return it when they finish it or keep it for their library, and they also accept donations from people who can leave the books they want to share in the booths.

“They are book-heavy reading spots and you can do whatever you want from using them normally to kill time and then returning them to taking them home. They will also be points of collection and exchange of books, where it will not be necessary to register or have a card or be aware of return deadlines, it is a library at hand and easily accessible, ”summarizes Luis Pacheco, spokesman for the SOS Casco Antiguo platform, who was the one who gave shape to the idea of ​​Carlos Díaz, whose charity bookstore shows barely 20% of the volumes it has in its warehouse, where it keeps the books that are donated to give them a second life.

«Carlos’s bookstore has the muscle to support 20 bookstores of this type. They are not old books, they are travelled, seasoned with the annotations or the underlined paragraphs of each reader who has had them in their hands”, says Pacheco and Díaz himself subscribes. In fact, this is the purpose, that in all the neighborhoods there is a street library, in the train and bus stations or in the garden of the University Hospital, in short, in places of recreation or waiting that are conducive to encouraging people to read. .

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With these first five street libraries, it will be tested how the initiative curdles. Its promoters are not very ambitious: “If a single kid got hooked on reading thanks to these libraries, we would not be satisfied,” admits Pacheco, who also knows that the booths may be vandalized. “We have two spare booths that we have made on the platform by hand and we will take care of making rounds for them to fix damage or fill them with books if we see that it is necessary.”

The classics

The selection of what people from Badajoz will be able to find in street libraries will be done following two premises. One, pulling from the classics of children’s, youth and adult literature, from Verne to Stendhal, through Joseph Conrad or Dostoyevski; and two, collecting the suggestions of the regulars of the charitable bookstore of the Carlos Díaz churrería. “Through a small mailbox, we would like people to choose the books they would like to find in the booths to feed them.”

This initiative aims to convert street libraries into part of urban furniture, such as benches, lampposts or litter bins. “It’s about normalizing books being available to everyone. We started with five booths, but it would be desirable for the books to reach each neighborhood, “concludes Pacheco.


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