化陋室为书馆的男人.docx

The man who turned his home into a public libraryIf you put all the books you own on the street outside your house, you might expect them to disappear in a trice. But one man in Manila tried it - and found that his collection grew.Hernando Guanlao is a sprightly man in his early 60s, with one abiding passion - books.Theyre his pride and joy, which is just as well because, whether he likes it or not, they seem to be taking over his house. Guanlao, known by his nickname Nanie, has set up an informal library outside his home in central Manila, to encourage his local community to share his joy of reading. The idea is simple. Readers can take as many books as they want, for as long as they want - even permanently. As Guanlao says: The only rule is that there are no rules. Its a policy you might assume would end very quickly - with Guanlao having no books at all.But in fact, in the 12 years hes been running his library - or, in his words, his book club - hes found that his collection has grown rather than diminished, as more and more people donate to the cause. It seems to me that the books are speaking to me. Thats why it multiplies like that, he says with a smile. The books are telling me they want to be read… they want to be passed around.Guanlao started his library in 2000, shortly after the death of his parents. He was looking for something to honour their memory, and that was when he hit upon the idea of promoting the reading habit hed inherited.I saw my old textbooks upstairs and decided to come up with the concept of having the public use them, he says.So he put the books - a collection of fewer than 100 - outside the door of his house to see if anyone wanted to borrow them. They did, and they brought the books back with others to add to the collection - and the library was born.Such is the current turnover that Guanlao confesses he has no idea how many books are in his possession, but there are easily 2,000 or 3,000 on the shelves and in the boxes stacked outside