Monday 14 November 2016

Some good news amid the chaos

South Shields has just opened The Word a totally gorgeous place with wonderful activities based around words, books, poetry, learning and all manner of good things.

When they closed their old Central Library they kindly donated all the old shelving to us, which was  fantastic as we never seem to have enough. We are sharing it between Borderline Books and the Kittiwake Trust Multilingual Library, where we are constantly bursting at the seams. In Team Valley we are pretty much sorted, but the library will take another two or three weeks before things are settled in their new positions.



Which reminds me - if you haven't yet visited our 'new' location in Team Valley (same building but upstairs on the other side, where we have been for a year now) you could do much worse than to pick Sunday afternoon on 27 November, when we will hold another Open Day / Fundraiser. There will be poets, music, food, a raffle with some really amazing prizes, and also this time information tables for some of the many organisations we work with on a regular basis. That way you can see how it works, and how well it works.




We have already donated more books this year than in the whole of 2015 - that was 10,053, but we've now passed 10,500 and have some new visitors coming this week who we hope will take a large quantity for people in York and Leeds.

You might have seen a notice that we also donated books to Vera Baird's office to be put in the custody suites (ie police cells). We hope that will encourage some more reading and generally make those first few hours of detention more bearable for all concerned.