How far would you travel to borrow a library book? Into town on the bus? One Edinburgh Napier campus to the other? How about trekking 18 kilometers through a forest in which you may or may not stumble across the occasional wild elephant? I’ll be honest – I probably wouldn’t bother. The patrons of the library in the remote Idukki district of Kerala in southern India, however, are prepared to do just that.

The library in Edamalakudi doubles as a teashop, which no doubt comes as a huge relief to the patrons who have climbed uphill through an impenetrable forest to pick up their paperbacks. Kerala is India’s most literate state, and the residents here – while poor and marginalised – are ardent readers. When it was first established in 2010, the library stocked precisely 160 books – all Indian classics – but over the years word of the library’s success has spread, and it has ambitions to collect a thousand more books. The library’s borrowing rate is high. We wish it a thousand books and a thousand more.

Read more about the Library here

Read our Post Libraries Around the World 🌏 for more fascinating information on different world libraries.

By Lesley McRobb