Alongside our belief in the power of poetry to enable people to change and grow (more of which, later), we’ve also had a somewhat latent relationship with libraries. We use the word ‘latent’ because it wasn’t until we began this journey that we fully realised just how important they were to us personally. Sure, we founded and operated a weekly library back in 2002 through 2003, and thence sporadically maintained access to it up until our UK departure in May 2006, but you know what? We just thought that was what everyone would quite like to do.

Doh.

This radical engagement that seems to have stolen up on us with regards to library and archive science, we in fact now see we always had as a child, but somehow, at some point, it seems we may have been told to put away childish things, except the things we put away were not childish at all, but in fact, one of our callings in life.

Need proof?

Just last year, amongst our childhood belongings, we found this in our mother’s attic:

My Child's Library1 My Child's Library2

Yes, on New Year’s day 1988, when we were still in single digits, the most important thing we decided we had to do was to catalogue our very own childhood library.

Do we remember doing this? No, frankly, we don’t. But there in our mother’s attic, in a box, this item exists, and it reminds us, when we find and re-read these bits of notepaper, some held together by a punched hole and string, that once, when we were a child, we spent some of our everyday life cataloguing and archiving books.