Ring! Ring! Britain’s Smallest Library calling …
June 26, 2010
You may have read that Britain’s once ubiquitous red phone boxes are in the process of becoming extinct. So, too, the mobile library relied upon by many small rural communities. “Aha!” said one small town and got to work solving two problems at once by creating a book exchange in a phone booth!
According to the Daily Mail, “resident Angela Buchanan was also full of praise for the book box. ‘It’s such a brilliant idea,’ she said. ‘Our nearest library is Wells, four miles away, so if you don’t want to go into the town but have run out of something to read, it’s great you can use this. All sorts of interesting books turn up – manuals, picture books, good literary novels.’
The door to the phone box graciously remains unlocked 24 hours a day and is conveniently kept lit at night. Volunteers review the collection of books and remove any that appear not to have been of interest, donating them to charity and replacing those books with new titles. Everything is kept fresh and interesting. It may be the smallest library in Britain but I bet it’s one of the busiest and certainly most quaint!
June 26, 2010 at 12:37 pm
Love it! And would love to hear more stories like this.
Steph