Little World Libraries.

Mount Holyoke College has come up with an excellent idea:

The LCC [Language & Culture Commons] is excited to present six new little free world libraries that have been installed on campus this summer. Based on the concept started by the Little Free Library organization, the LCC student staff collaborated with the Fimbel lab folks (a big thank you to Kris Camp) to design and create the boxes during the 2021-22 academic year. Each little library provides books in one or two different languages and the MHC community is encouraged to “take a book, share (or leave) a book” as written on the little library doors in the language that the box holds. Feel free to borrow and/or donate a book to the box in the language of choice. We hope you thoroughly enjoy these new additions to the campus.

Pratt Hall: Chinese and Vietnamese
Ciruti Language Center: Spanish
Elliot House: Japanese
LITS/Dwight: French and Italian
Prospect Hall: Russian and German
Kendall Sports & Dance Complex: Arabic and Korean

There are pictures at the link. Thanks, Sven!

Comments

  1. J.W. Brewer says

    An old-time (est. 1837) New England liberal arts college and they can’t bother to have a Latin/Greek “little library”? Harrumph! For shame! (They apparently do still teach the traditional learned languages although with the indignity that the relevant faculty have been squeezed into something called the “Department of Classics and Italian.”).

  2. Hey, nobody’s gonna put their OCTs and Teubners into free-book boxes.

  3. John Cowan says

    Little boxes / On the campus / Little boxes / Full of bookie-bookies …

  4. Stu Clayton says

    At some point back in 2004, the last time I was in the States, I was with my sister in a small Mississippi town. We visited a guy she knew who was the librarian at the small town library. I got along well with him, and hit on the idea of donating something.

    I may have given him some money, but unfortunately I seem to remember I later ordered several volumes of Luhmann in German and had them shipped there. Lost in the mists of time is the reason why I imagined that Advanced Thinking would be welcome in Ripley, Miss.

    Indeed, don’t put your OCTs and Teubners into free-book boxes, they will just weird out the natives.

  5. The Loeb Library is good enough for them.

  6. Stu Clayton says

    Yeah, that way they need to read only half a book at each throw. When you’ve been picking cotton all day, you’re so tuckered out that you fall asleep halfway through a Loeb, but then you’ve finished it !

  7. J.W. Brewer says

    Come on, you can start off by donating free copies of lower-stress Latin texts like Winnie Ille Pu or Asterix Gallus. Whether a text with a facing-page English translation would be within the spirit of the thing is I guess debatable? (I recently helped fund the publication of a new English translation of some Patristic texts; I thought having the original Greek side-by-side made for a nicer product but of course it made the whole volume thicker and thus more expensive to print.)

  8. Stu Clayton says

    … some Patristic texts; I thought having the original Greek side-by-side made for a nicer product

    Like putting loebstick on a pig.

  9. Or a Polycarp.

  10. Stu Clayton says

    Heroin Pig is a manager at Burger King. He is 28 years old and has one child (Polycarp Pig).

  11. By the bye, I somehow have never heard until now about the Boots Book-Lovers’ Library.

  12. Bathrobe says

    The housing complex I used to live in in Beijing had a similar scheme, although on a very small scale. There was a small collection of books that could be added to or taken away at will.

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