"When Amanda Oliver began work as a school librarian, fueled by a lifelong love of books and a desire to help, she felt qualified for the job. What she learned was that librarians are expected to serve as mediators and mental-health-crisis support professionals, customer service reps and administrators of overdose treatment, fierce loyalists to institutionalized mythology and enforced silence, and arms of state surveillance. Based on firsthand experiences...

"Libraries are much more than mere collections of volumes. The best are magical, fabled places whose fame has become part of the cultural wealth they are designed to preserve. Some still exist today; some are lost, like those of Herculaneum and Alexandria; some have been sold or dispersed; and some never existed, such as those libraries imagined by J.R.R Tolkien, Umberto Eco, and Jorge Luis Borges, among others. Ancient libraries, grand baroque libraries,...

Luis has so many books in his little house in Colombia that he buys two donkeys and travels throughout the land bringing the joy of reading to children.

"When he was a child in the 1840s, Andrew Carnegie and his family immigrated to America in search of a new beginning. His working-class Scottish family arrived at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Carnegie worked hard, in factories and telegraphy. He invested in railroads, eventually becoming the richest man in the world during his time. Carnegie believed strongly in sharing his wealth, and one of the ways he did this was by funding the construction...

"William Morris is best known for his colorful wallpapers and textiles, inspired by the English forests and wild foliage where he grew up. But did you know this icon of the Arts and Crafts Movement was also a poet, a painter, a preservationist, an activist, an environmentalist, and a maker of many other beautiful useful things, like books?"-- "A poetic story about the life and work of William Morris, maker of beautiful, useful things, sure to engage...

A humorist and honest look at a life in public service. For most of us, librarians are the quiet people behind the desk, who, apart from the occasional "shush", vanish into the background. But in Quiet, Please, McSweeney's contributor Scott Douglas puts the quirky caretakers of our literature front and center. With a keen eye for the absurd and a Kesey-esque cast of characters (witness the librarian who is sure Thomas Pynchon is Julia Roberts's...

Thomas Jefferson loved to read and collect books on almost every subject. He built his first library as a young man, and kept on building until his book collection helped to create the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the world's largest library.

This elegant and insightful biography of Madeleine L'Engle (1918-2007) was written by her granddaughters, Charlotte Jones Voiklis and Léna Roy. Using never-before-seen archival materials that include photographs, poems, letters, and journal entries from when Madeleine was a child until just after the publication of her classic, A Wrinkle in Time, her granddaughters weave together an in-depth and unique view of the famous writer. It is a story of...

Explore the life and career of award-winning author Nikki Grimes.

Through narrative nonfiction, readers learn the story of Alia Muhammad Baker, a librarian who preserved Iraq's history by saving thousands of books from being destroyed during the Iraq War.