The Little Station Library

And Other Inspiring Places where Books and Transport Meet

// Last week, I wrote about the co-evolution of railways and books. To summarize: railway journeys, often of several hours, often in compartments, were ideal settings for reading a book, a newspaper, or a magazine. In the mid-19th century, booksellers such as W.H. Smith in England, and Hachette in France, got their start selling novels at stalls in train stations. (My friend, the writer and translator David Homel, reminds me that roman de gare — "train-station novel" — is an expression used to describe a book that is distracting but superficial; the French equivalent, more or less, of our "beach read.") Later, Penguin, those portable paperback editions of high-quality literary works, was born when publisher Allen Lane, regretting the lack of something to read on his way back from a meeting with Agatha Christie, came up with the idea for a vending machine for paperbacks on train platforms.

But the buying and selling of books was only one aspect of this co-evolution. From the start, lending libraries were associated with rail networks, which makes sense: a network of stations is similar to a municipal library system, with its many branches serving different neighborhoods. In 1849 Paddington Station in London had a lending library with 1,000 volumes, mostly fiction, which you could read for a penny; for a slightly higher fee, you could read them on the train and drop them off at the station where you disembarked (or, more precisely, if less elegantly, detrained).

I encountered one such library in an unexpected place: the high-speed rail station in Ankara, Turkey. I'd ridden there from Istanbul to research a feature for National Geographic, and discovered that Ankara actually had two distinct, and distinctly striking, stations.

There was the original, the imposing Art Deco station, built in 1935 by architect Şekip Akalın when he was only 25 years old; it's all marble concourses, and soaring ceilings, reminiscent of Milan's Fascist-era central station.

But connected to it is the Ankara Tren Gari, completed in 2016, which is more like a modern airport terminal—polished floors and escalators rising up multiple levels towards an arching glass ceiling. And there I found the "High Speed Rail Library," where I talked to a patient librarian, with just enough English. She explained that, once you filled out a registration form, you could borrow a book and return it in Konya, Istanbul, or bring it back to Ankara.

(My Turkish is near non-existent, though I suppose I could have tried Panik Yok! or other Turkish language volumes of The Diary of a Wimpy Kid series.)

A station-library I love is the one that was located in Haarlem, a city of 160,000 about twenty kilometers west of Amsterdam. It was located on the station platform, and had about 2,000 volumes. People who already belonged to the municipal library could get an annual card for €10, but new sign-ups had to pay €40.

If you didn't want a card, you could borrow items for a flat fee of €2.50. According to the project's website : "The train station library is set up like a retail shop. This means that most of the book covers are facing out. Frontal presentation is not only attractive, but it also means that customers who are in a hurry need less time to decide if a book is of any interest to them. The library has five zones, starting with one where a customer only needs 20 seconds to return a book, choose a new one from the books just returned by other customers, and check out."

Turns out this was a five-year pilot project, whose goal was to drive up memberships; alas, from what I can tell, De Bibliotheek op het station (The Library at the Station) no longer exists. Shame, it's a beautiful idea!

Another beautiful idea: putting a library on a metro train. This is what they did in South Korea. On the Gyeongui Line, outside Seoul a mobile library allowed you to borrow a print book (or download an e-book on your device) during your ride. Not sure if this continues (if anybody has an update, I'd love to hear it in the comments!)

I recall having seen book vending machines on subways before, including machines with current bestsellers on the platforms of Santiago's Metro in Chile. When I posted about the books-trains theme on social media, Tricia Wood, on Mastodon, sent me photos of the BiblioMetro in Madrid; according to her, 12 of the city's metro stations have these automatic "lending" machines.

That reminded me of a similar machine I'd seen, back in 2015, at one of Edmonton, Alberta's light-rail stations, run by the Edmonton Public Library.

The machine seemed to offer DVDs and games, though there was a drop off slot for items of all kinds. I love the promo line "We're bigger than our buildings," and it turns out that Edmonton has been thinking outside the box when it comes to transit and books for decades. This is the city that launched the Edmonton Streetcar Library back in the 1950s. According to a 1942 newsreel, the city used electric streetcars "to spread the light of knowledge to its 92,000 residents sprawled thinly over 27,000 acres." The idea was that if you couldn't make it to the books in the central library downtown, the books would come to you.

Eventually, of course, as streetcars were replaced by buses (a process known as "bustitution," a tool in the forced extinction of the North American streetcar, which I wrote about in this post), the Bookmobile was born—diesel buses doing the same job as the old electric streetcars. Not sure if this is what I'd call progress. Here's an early example of the Bookmobile, at a time when trolleys were still running, from New York City:

Libraries and sustainable transport make for a beautiful union. I'll leave you with the ultimate example: the mash-up of the branch library and the cargobike. This one is the initiative of Ednita Kelly. "The Book Bike [is] a custom-built, book-toting three-wheeler she rides near the San Pedro branch where she works, issuing library cards and handing out free books and magazines on the go"; more on the initiative in this article.

Ah...perfect! I second the gnomic social media master Peter Golkin, of Arlington, Texas, who once posted: "My two favorite things: libraries and bicycles. They both move people forward without wasting anything."

If you've encountered any other intersections of libraries and sustainable transportation, please let me know in the comments.