“People who read are less stupid than others” wrote the late Bernard Pivot in 2018 at the end of Lire !an ode to reading and writers.
Who could doubt this assertion?
However, we are not equal when it comes to reading… Who reads? Who doesn’t read, who doesn’t read anymore?
And if you read… Why do you read? What do you read?
Do you dog-ear books? Do you scribble in the margins? Do you keep your books pristine as if no one had opened them…
Nothing more intimate than the relationship with books… This library arranged in order of collection, or colors, or in bulk, in a pile, on the floor
Do you buy your books new or used? Do you have to own them? Or do you borrow them from the library?
Do you leave finished or abandoned books after a few chapters, on a bench, on a bus or in a book box?
The book boxes are an open-air library… No registration, no charge, no staff, no filter, no judgment… We put down, we pick up, we leaf through, we put away… And in recent years, they have multiplied. There are around ten thousand compared to 2,000 7 years ago. Who are the users? Why such momentum? Should we see this as a distrust of institutional book spaces? Or complementarity?
For this grand finale of “Under the Radars”, after three wonderful seasons accompanying you on Saturdays at noon, no doubt while preparing lunch, let’s explore the book boxes that say a lot about who we are.
To read to go further:
Who are the audiences for book boxes? Claude Poissenot’s investigation on The Conversation website
The wild success of book boxes: “I like the idea of introducing an author I like”article published in Le Parisien
In book boxes, from Régine Deforges to Jacques Attali, the other literary returnarticle published in Le Monde
