Since quite a few people were impressed with the pictures of our library café, I felt it was necessary to bring you all back down to earth with this post. The café might be lovely and the courtyard the nicest bookish hangout you can imagine, however, the library itself sucks.

It is a large library, it serves a city of about 500.000 people and has various branches all over the city with one main library in the center. It also has so-called "book buses" that visit schools on a regular schedule to enable pupils to get books even if their parents don’t take them to the library.

The main library is being renovated at the moment so part of it had to be moved to various nearby buildings, but the transition seems to have gone smoothly and it does not seem to be some improvised arrangement, but it looks as if everything works fine (the renovation will be going on for another year or two, I think).

So, what is not so great about this bookish place?

• The opening times. The library opens at 11am and closes at 6pm, except for Wednesdays when it doesn’t open at all. Saturdays it is open for 3 hours and Sunday – that goes without saying, because it is the Day of the Lord and we are in God fearing Bavaria – it is closed again. Oh, hold on, wait a minute, on Thursdays it’s open one hour longer, until 7pm. That’s when all the people who have to work for a living might make it there to rush through it.
• The staff is not really that helpful and/or friendly. There are some people who could actually work in the free economy and succeed, but all in all they are as friendly as Rosa Klebb.
• It offers no events to speak of. When it does they take place in some suburb branch.
• The few English books on offer are about two decades old. I am aware it is a German library but you would think that nowadays they would make sure that they are a tiny bit multilingual.
• The late fees are outrageous.
• They charged me late fees for one of the boys even though they accumulated because the book bus returned to his school only after the due date.  Is that my fault?
• At the moment there are two buildings and, of course, various departments, each with their own return desk. If you have three books, let’s say a children’s book, a novel and a non fiction book you have to go to three different return desks in two buildings to return three books.
• They have about four different cashiers (to pay the late fee), but invariably if you want to pay at a desk they will say “You can pay just about anywhere but not with me.”
• Their website is boring, bleak and uninformative, apart from the standard info like opening times etc. If you don’t know the library and think, “I’m going to check out their website to see whether it is worth joining” you will undoubtedly decide against becoming a member.

So you think a nice café compensates for that? I don’t.

Our library is being renovated at the moment, however, one part of it is left alone. It used to be an old cloister and the library cafe is situated on the ground floor with view to an inner courtyard.

They serve homemade cakes, snacks and drinks and also offer a large variety of international daily newspapers. A great place to sit, relax and read…

 

 

 

 

Does your library have a café? What does it look like?

Korn & Berg is Germany’s oldest book store . The shop which was at the same time a printing shop as well as a publishing house was opened in 1531 by Johann Ott who became a Nürnberg citizen that year.

The shop today specializes in regional literature and university books. 

 

 

 

Korn & Berg have also published a very nice video showing the sights of Nürnberg.

If you don’t know Bookshelf Porn yet and love books, you should definitely have a look at it. Eye candy en masse!

In my post about Thalia, one of the big bookstores in the city, I never got around to showing you a nice little reading corner. I am not sure it was even there at the time, at least I never noticed it. Only today my son discovered this cozy little place. It is a bit hidden, so you can probably lie there and read for hours without being detected. German bookstores are really nice to their customers.

This is another one of our book stores, Hugendubel. Like Thalia, it is a chain, but much smaller. Hugendubel runs twenty odd shops and an online store as well. However, it is only one part of a bigger corporation.

Store front

Fiction and non fiction

Kids’ department

Top floor with esoteric department

The one thing that will always stick with me is the fact that Hugendubel was the first shop I ever saw that offered seats and sofas where people could read books in the shop without having to buy them first. That must have been at the end of the eighties in their shop in Munich (I suppose it was their first shop, too). When I went in there and saw those little reading spots I was stumped. A bookshop where you could actually sit down and read? Unheard of at the time! Nowadays this is common, at least in the big shops, but at the time, Hugendubel was cutting-edge.

Our book shelves are in a state of perpetual transition. We sort them out, arrange everything and by the time we are finished we need to re-arrange again. Unfortunately the space for books does not grow proportionally to the acquisition of books.

So this is the current state of some of our shelves. There are more opposite and in other rooms, but this is a large part. As you can see from the boxes and the general disorder we will never be done.

The books are three or four rows deep which makes it hard to find any specific book. This is the reason why I said in a former Weekly Geeks post that sometimes I can’t find a book I want to read. The books simply get sucked up in the maelstrom only to turn up again by chance. So far we haven’t found a solution to the problem. Just. Not. Enough. Space.

At Leeswamme’s blog I put up a picture of our local (or rather one of our local) bookstores for the Book bloggers abroad event. Today I want to share some more pictures that didn’t appear in that blog post. Just because I love that shop.

Thalia storefront

The bookstore belongs to a chain called Thalia that runs over 230 bookstores in Germany and also has an online shop. It has 4 stories, a huge section of English books, tons of audio books and also sells all those nifty accessories around books, like pillows to place your book in your lap on, cook book holders, book stands, bookmarks, book covers with book quotes on them etc. When they have a theme week, like a specific country or topic, they put up lovely decorations revolving around that theme.

Main floor with some oriental decoration

Kids books and YA

Audio books for kids and playground in the back

In the esoteric book section they sell incense sticks, there is a little fountain in the middle of the area, you can sit on nice chairs looking outside, it’s all very cosy and makes it hard to leave the shop without buying anything.

Esoteric section

In the audio book department there are comfy leather sofas and a lot of devices to listen to the books. If you feel like having something to drink you can go to the coffee shop on the third floor and get yourself a drink to either take away or enjoy right there.

Audio book section

Nonfiction

As you probably can imagine, going there is never boring.

National Library Week is coming up April 11-17, and April is School Libraries Month (2010 is the 25th anniversary). This got me wondering about the state of libraries around the globe.
What’s your earliest memory of a library? What was it like for you? Were you more likely to hang out in the gym or the library when you were in school?
How’s the health of the library system in your community? How do you support your local library? How often do you check out books from the library vs. buying books? Tell us what your favorite library is like and include some photos if you can.

I remember that when I was a little girl I went to the local library with my mother. We had our library booklet where the librarian used to fill out by hand what books we got and when they were due. Then she would fill out the card which stuck in the book with our reader number and due date. The cards she kept. I have no idea what system they used back in those days to keep track of which books were due and who had them. They must have been pretty efficient in organizing.

Then years later I went to another library where they had little punch cards that were punched with a machine, not a computer yet, but definitely technically more advanced than the older system.

I always loved libraries. There was a time when I didn’t go that often, but now, that the kids like to read or be read to, I go more often again. I don’t get that much fiction, which I tend to rather buy and keep, but I’m getting tons of non-fiction there. Our older son has his own library card which he also uses with the library bus that comes to his school every two months. Also both our boys are members of the local church library because the kindergarten goes there regularly. So, at least where I live, the kids automatically get used to libraries from a very early age.

The library system seems to be pretty healthy over here. Our local library has several little branches in the various parts of town and a number of library buses that go to schools. That way most of the school kids have a library card – whether they all use it though, I don’t know. Our library is situated in an old building (not old enough to be beautiful, just old enough to be ugly, except for some parts), but is in the process of being renovated. Some parts of the building are either torn down or cored, so that the library had to move into different other buildings. Quite inconvenient because for kids’ books you have to go here, for non-fiction you have to go to another place…In one of the buildings they have a small cafe with lots of international newspapers where you can hang out for hours reading and watching people. It has a courtyard where you can sit outside in summer. Very nice and quiet.

Whenever we go to the library it is packed. Not that this reflects whether the library makes good money. It is subsidized and only wants money from the readers when books are not returned in time.

You can see a lot of beautiful libraries at Curious Expeditions. But I want to draw your attention to a private library. It is Jay Walker’s library in his home in New England. If I had a library like that I don’t think I’d ever leave my house again. AMAZING!

I had a look around for famous libraries and came across some ancient ones of which only ruins remain.

 

All four images above from flick’r.

To read what other weekly geeks have to say about libraries go here. Oh, and the library in the original weekly geeks post is the Library of Congress.

Not only does Great Britain have very small houses, now they claim to have the smallest library in the world, too.

In a village in Somerset they purchased and transformed a red telephone booth into a library. From the description it sounds more like a BookCrossing location than a library. What a cool idea! I like the thought of not having to go all over the place but just go to the phone booth to drop off and pick up books.

And just because I can, I’m posting an image of the smallest house in Great Britain, located in Conwy, Wales.