The library with no rules

Manila's Reading Club 2000 is a library like no other: it lets anyone borrow and then bring back or keep any of its thousands of books


Hernando Guanlao and his library in the centre of Manila in the Philippines

Books, believes Hernando Guanlao, need to live. And they're only alive if they are being read. Thought and effort, time and money went into making them; they will never repay it lying idle in a cabinet or on a shelf. Books need to be set free. So walk by his home on Balagtas Street in Makati, downtown Manila, and it seems books are pretty much all you'll see. Thousands of them, on shelves and in crates outside on the pavement, piled high in the garage and on the stairs, each one free to anyone who wants it.


"People can borrow, take home, bring back or keep," says Guanlao, 60, a former tax accountant, ice-cream salesman and government employee known by all as Nanie. "Or they can share and pass on to another. But basically they should just take, take!" Guanlao reckons books "have lives, and have to lead them. They have work to do. And the act of giving a book …it makes you complete. It makes your life meaningful and abundant."

Thankfully for Guanlao's faith in human nature, people also give – often people he has never previously met, or doesn't even see: they leave boxes of books outside his door. "What's taken gets replaced many times over," he says. "I don't keep an inventory. But there are a lot of books. They want to be read, so they come here."

The Reading Club 2000, as it is called, began 12 years ago as a tribute to Guanlao's late parents, both civil servants. "They gave me my love of reading," he says. "I wanted to honour them and to do some kind of community service. So I put my old books – and my brothers' and sisters', maybe 100 in all – outside, to see if anyone was interested."

It took a while for people to work out that this was, as Guanlao puts it, a library "open 24/7, and with no rules", but the scheme, offering everything from battered crime paperbacks to fashion magazines, technical manuals, arcane histories and school textbooks, is booming.

It is helped by the fact that despite a 1994 act pledging "reading centres throughout the country", the Philippines, with a population of 92 million, has fewer than 700 public libraries, and buying books is a luxury many cannot afford.

Fortunately the Reading Club is spreading. Guanlao takes boxes of books into Manila's neighbourhoods himself, on a specially adapted book bike. He has also helped friends set up similar schemes at 10 other sites around the country, and inspired student book drives.

Aurora Verayo, from a town several hours drive from Manila, says she came to see Guanlao to donate books, but he persuaded her to open her own centre. "I'm going a step further and offering reading sessions for children," she says. "This is the start of a movement." Mark, a 16-year-old accountancy student at the Philippine Christian University in Manila, is organising a book drive with friends. "We've collected 90 books so far, and we expect many more," he says. "We're taking them to the barrios next month. Books open minds. A book can take you anywhere."

from: Guardian