Westbury-sub-Mendip is an appropriately editor-friendly name for a village that today hit the news for claiming to be home to the world's smallest public library. No one wanted to use the old traditional red phone box hanging about on the street corner in these days of iPhones and email, but no one wanted to see the familiar feature removed either, so BT sold it to the community for the princely sum of £1. The locals promptly installed shelves and stocked it with a vast array of popular second-hand novels, and instigated a simple one-in one-out system so the library can always be replete with crap old Helen Fielding cast-offs and dog-eared Dan Browns.
Gives a new meaning to phone books, eh? (Sorry.)
Andrew Buchanan from Westbury-sub-Mendip has been in touch. He has given me a quick rundown of what's currently available in the phone box lending library, and it's pretty impressive:
ReplyDeleteJust checked the shelves. There's one Helen Fielding, but no Dan Brown. There are a number of thrillers, but these include just one by Agatha Christie, while there are 3 by Georges Simenon. We also have books by George Sand, EF Benson, Fay Weldon, Leo Tolstoy, Isabel Allende, Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. Factual includes biographies of Willy Brandt and Bill Clinton, a detailed analysis of the Ring Cycle plus cookery and gardening books, and I suspect a nit-picking pedant like yourself would appreciate the Lynne Truss.
A pretty eclectic mix if you ask me - and we're waiting to see what comes in the post from some BookCrossing people.