In this Lonely Planet extract, “Hidden Libraries”, the author Nancy Pearl, shares her wisdom about the wonders of the world’s secret gems for all book lovers.
“One truth I’ve learned in my long career as a librarian is that a library serves different purposes for different people,” shares Nancy Pearl in Lonely Planet’s latest book ‘Hidden Libraries.’
Every library is valuable in its particular way, and each is an example of the role and importance of libraries in the community of humanity.
Although I’ve spoken at libraries in many countries, I never imagined, until I read Diana Helmuth’s fascinating and informative guide to ‘hidden’ libraries all over the world, that, to paraphrase Hamlet, there are actually more libraries, and kinds of libraries, than are dreamt of in our library science classes. A ‘hidden’ library, then, is a library that likely would be unfamiliar to most of us, no matter how much we describe ourselves as readers and lovers of libraries.
When I read Helmuth’s book, there was only one library that I was even tangentially familiar with: the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, which straddles the US-Canadian border. The others she describes were a revelation and a delightful surprise.
And all of them began as someone or some group’s recognition of a certain need in their community. I was of course familiar with bookmobiles, a staple of many libraries. In fact, my first job as a librarian was working on a bookmobile; we took books to housing projects and underserved communities all over Detroit. In Helmuth’s research she discovered the Biblioburro in the Magdalena Valley, near Colombia’s Caribbean coast. Starting with one burro, it now employs over 20 traveling donkey libraries. Then there’s the Horse Library in Hawassa, Ethiopia, which is not, as might be thought, a collection of books about horses, but rather a collection of books delivered to outlying communities by horse.
In Garissa, Kenya, camels delivered books to the desert nomads: “Every morning the Kenyan Library Service prepared three camels for travel. The party consisted of a librarian in charge, two assistants and a skilled camel herdsman who knew how to keep the moody beasts healthy and in check. One camel was tasked with carrying a whopping 400 books.
Another was packed with a tent, reading mat and chairs. The third just waited for one of the other two to fall apart so it could sub in. These librarians and animals regularly worked until nightfall, ranging 7 miles (11km) in any direction from their home base, Monday through Thursday.” I loved finding out about St Catherine’s Monastery Library, in Sinai, Egypt, in which the oldest texts date back to the 4th century. I learned there’s a library in London that is all about journalists and journalism: the St Bride Foundation Library, which can be found, where else, on Fleet Street. There are vending machine libraries in Shenzhen, China, and an open-air library in Magdeburg, Germany.
There are actually 13 different libraries in Chinguetti, Mauritania, deep in the Saharan desert.
The village was founded in 777 CE as a trading post. “Chinguetti’s Rue des Savants (street of intelligent ones) gained fame as a gathering place for students, Imams and pilgrims on their way to and from Mecca to debate the finer points of Islamic law. Sometimes, these sages left books behind.” These libraries – many of which are run by the families who own these precious materials – now contain over 6,000 texts, some from the 9th century.
I knew about the tragic destruction of the great library in Alexandria, Egypt, in the 3rd century, of course, but Helmuth discovered numerous other no-longer-in-existence hidden libraries. I was most interested in the Lost Library of the Moscow Tsars, which, as Helmuth points out, might not ever have existed at all. The Golden Library, as it was known, has never been found, and the treasures it contained (if indeed the library existed) are beyond measure.
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* Hero image of the Camel Library is Getty Images/Lonely Planet
