DONATE YOUR UNWANTED BOOKS AT ONE OF THE FOLLOWING DROP OFF POINTS:

• THE BASE, LIVERPOOL GUILD OF STUDENTS – University of Liverpool

• LJMU UNION (THE HAIGH BUILDING)

• SYDNEY JONES LIBRARY (Tues 20th Oct – Sun 25th Oct) – University of Liverpool

• HAROLD COHEN LIBRARY (Mon 26th Oct – Sun 31st Oct) – University of Liverpool

• THE LAW BUILDING – University of Liverpool

• ELEANOR RATHBONE BUILDING – University of Liverpool

• CYPRESS BUILDING – University of Liverpool

CDs, DVDs etc. also welcome!

You can also donate at our weekly meetings – every Monday at 5pm in the International Lounge, in the Guild (and if you want to become a volunteer, please feel free to come along!).

Do you already know about READ’s great work?

Find us on Facebook: ‘Read International Book Project Liverpool 2009/10’. Check us out at: www.readinternational.org.uk

— — —

Here is some information about our project and other ways you can help:

Profit driven book companies in the UK produce 6th, 7th and 8th editions of textbooks every year, which schools are forced to buy in order to maintain an image of being up to date. This results in an abundance of disused, high-quality textbooks gathering dust in UK secondary school cupboards. The aim of Read International Book Projects is to collect these books and send them to secondary schools in Tanzania, where the syllabus is almost identical and is taught in English.

In Tanzania, the government gives each child 30p per year to spend on textbooks, which, if they buy new, will cost them £11 per textbook. We can ship the books to Tanzania for no more than 50p each. Of course, we only take the most useful and up to date books, and any books that are not appropriate, such as politics or religion, are sold online or recycled to generate funding.

We have some huge targets to meet and this is why we need your help! So far, READ has shipped over half a million textbooks to Tanzanian schools. This year, out Liverpool Book Project aims to send another 25,000 books, and will need to raise £7500 by June 2010 in order to fund this target. Whether you want to get involved in contacting schools, picking up books and sorting through them, raising awareness and funds or simply supporting by coming to our weekly meetings, READ is open to everyone and is a great opportunity.

Some of the benefits the READ offers YOU include training in delivering Think Global workshops to Key Stage 3 students focusing on active global citizenship, the opportunity to earn your V50 certificate if you volunteer more than 50 hours of your time, which looks great on your C.V., the chance to actually go to Tanzania yourself in the summer of 2010 and redistribute the books we collect this year, and, of course, a lot of fun!

This is one of the most effective ways to alleviate poverty in Africa.

Hon Margaret Sitta MP, Minister for Education (Tz)

Any questions do not hesitate to contact us at liverpool@bookproject.org.uk

Jane Mathieson, Regional Reader Development Co-ordinator for North West Libraries, has drawn our attention to a completely unedited piece supplied by a user of Halton Lea Library, giving his initial impressions of the newly refurbished library.

It’s very refreshing to read something so positive, which has been written spontaneously and generously. You can read the piece by clicking here.

‘Seriously addictive’. ‘Once you’ve started it’s hard to stop’.

The above are slogans that are to be used in the latest campaign for the promotion of reading, though you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise. The initiative, which to begin with will target existing book buyers, has been deemed ‘edgy [...] clever, fun, flexible, memorable’ and ‘a PR catapult’. Such praise of the campaign is hardly surprising, when you consider that it comes from Damian Horner, the man responsible for creating the concept: “Bookaholism”. The project was first initiated by Publisher’s Association CEO Simon Juden and carried through at the Book Industry Conference in order to kick-start the PR stunt and encourage people to buy more books.

Though the campaign will firstly be aimed at those who already purchase books, its creator believes it will also be effective if targeted at those less enthusiastic readers who ‘Quick Reads’ are currently aimed at, with the long term objective being to ‘build (the campaign) into a holistic concept’. Though the overall purpose is obviously to promote books, we’re wondering if it can be right to promote them with the negative associations that inevitably come with addiction. Horner’s slogans of ‘Class A Reading Material’ and ‘Get Hooked on a Book’ certainly make an impact, but is it in the right way? Is this idea of Bookaholism and addiction the only way to inspire and encourage people to pick up a book? Or, as Damian Horner says, will people be just as open to professing themselves ‘Bookaholics’ as they will ’shopaholics and chocaholics’?

We can only wait and see as to what Horner will be promoting as his ‘Class A Reading Material’…

When Jonathan Swift began writing the series of letter-diaries now known as the Journal to Stella on 2 September 1710, he was a forty-three-year-old Irish country parson, and little more than that. Of the great Irish literary late-starters, even Samuel Becket (forty-nine when Waiting for Godot was staged in London) was successful slightly sooner. In fact Swift had to wait until the publication of Gulliver’s Travels (1727) in his sixtieth year before he won real literary fame. The woman for whom Swift wrote the Journal to Stella, Esther Johnson, died shortly after Gulliver appeared, and probably never knew the scale of its triumph.

Here’s the link again.

Powered by Qumana

Visiting Literature For All Of Us was a terrific experience. I had breakfast with Karen Thomson (Executive Director) in a studenty café – sorry I didn’t get the name – in Evanston. (Karen had a poached egg and wholewheat toast, I had steelmilled pinhead oatmeal with cinnamon apples–probably one of the best things I’ve eaten on this whole trip). We sat in a booth and exchanged working life histories and compared the growth, successes and problems of our two organisations. It was fascinating to see our Reader story almost completely replicated but translated, as it were, into American… Later Karen drove me to the LFAOU offices via the Lakefront Park on the north shore–Lake Michigan like a calm sea, unimaginably big,and bright with autumn sunshine.

I talked to all the project workers and the rest of the team and we compared notes about books, and funding and–believe me–administrative procedures! Then I was taken through into Karen’s office for a celebratory lunch, complete with balloons and champagne and cake. These girls know how to throw an office lunch.

Here are some pictures. First the LFAOU team and then A picture of me with Rebecca and La Coya:

Posted by Jane Davis

Copies of Longing, which includes new writing about Liverpool by over 80 authors, will be handed out at over 50 different venues across Merseyside on August 28th and The Reader is helping to give away copies of the book. Everyone who emails us on Tuesday 28th August will get a free copy of Longing. Just send an email including your postal address to us using the contact form in the menu above. All new subscribers to The Reader magazine will also get a free copy of Longing until all our copies are gone. Deborah Mulhearn, editor and compiler of Longing is featured in The Reader Number 28, which will be published at Christmas 2007.

More information about Mersey Minis is available here. You can subscribe to The Reader here.

The entries are on women who produced a substantial amount of work before 1700, some or all of which has been translated into modern English. Each entry will tell you about the print sources from which the translated passages are taken; it will also tell you of useful secondary sources and Internet sites, when those are available.

 Here’s the link.

Posted by Chris Powered by Qumana

Hugh McGuire, founder of Librivox, had this to say in an interview on the Creative Commons website:

The immediate reason was practical — I was going on a long drive and I was looking for free public domain audiobooks on the Net; there weren’t very many, and I thought there should be.

But other than that practical need I wanted to address, LibriVox came out of a few conceptual strands. The first was the idealism of the free software movement, and it’s pragmatic success. Here was a parallel system (to the proprietary software system) built almost entirely out of volunteer effort, and hugely successful to boot. I was very interested in how free software ideals and methodologies could be applied to non-software projects: could the same sorts of ideas be used in the real world?

Here’s the link to Librivox.

Posted by Chris, Powered by Qumana

Here’s the link to Pepys’s diary.

Posted by Chris. Powered by Qumana