It’s been some time since my last post — I’ve completed my first year as assistant library director at a small university, and I admit that budget season, the end of the spring semester, performance management plans (I had to write 14) and writing the annual report have made me busier than I expected. It’s also the season for trying to go to annual meetings of regional library organizations, and my home life has also been occupying a fair bit of my time. I will try to blog more regularly
Today I saw this article about a Columbian man, Jose Alberto Gutierrez, who was not afforded a formal education and worked as a garbage collector. He began gathering books that other people threw out and over the years filled his house. He has thousands and thousands of books and shares them with his neighbors, especially kids.
He saves books and he helps people, and that’s what librarianship is about, in many ways. He’s even helping FARC fighters who now have to find a new way to live. HIs comment on that: ““Books transformed me, so I think books are a symbol of hope for those places,” Gutierrez said. “They are a symbol of peace.””
I leave you with that for now. Books as a symbol of hope and peace. A man with hardly any education who has become a librarian for children around his country.
The Nocturnal Librarian 
Oh, what a perfect analogy: books as hope. Thank you for this lovely observation, Deb. I’m reminded me of that story of the woman who was in an Italian prison during the Fascist regime, and someone tossed in a “book” of matches with the word, Couragio, written inside. My imagination then takes me to an artist’s book, one covered with feathers–Dickinson’s hope thing again.