
Thirty Years & Two Metres Under
A shy girl hiding fairy books behind the encyclopedias, a man with 23,600 stolen volumes, and the two metre gap where a book can vanish for thirty years.
On the people who keep culture, and the machines learning to help.
How a handful of activists trying to get books to one jailed friend became thirty thousand books a year, and why that floor is now cracking.


A shy girl hiding fairy books behind the encyclopedias, a man with 23,600 stolen volumes, and the two metre gap where a book can vanish for thirty years.

From a Swedish sorority party to armed anime librarians, the many afterlives of the woman in the mousy cardigan.

Sweden still scores above average in reading, and that is exactly what the numbers are hiding.

Why the anger I expected at ALA never came, and why we’d refuse to sell Librar to anyone replacing a librarian.

On school librarians, the hours that get away from them, and what they would do with just one more.

First impressions from four days on the floor of the ALA conference in Chicago.