On the occasion of Día de la Biblioteca (Library Day), we approach the relationship of writers with neighborhood public libraries.

We collect the memoirs of Silvia Nanclares in the Moratalaz neighborhood and recover a text in which Andrea Abreu explained the birth of “Panza de burro,” in a library in Tetuán.

Since 1997, every October 24th, Library Day is celebrated, which this year has the slogan Las blibliotecas nos cuidan (Libraries take care of us). A phrase that one can approach with a more or less metaphorical spirit.

More or less literally, also. Libraries (public ones are the most important), are the “palaces of the people,” as referred to by the sociologist Eric Klinenberg; they are also the mines of stories, the video store of people without Netflix, the air-conditioned space and the public bathroom of the man who came in just to read the newspaper. Lately, this reality is being put into literature and printed in official papers: the library as a third place – between work and the street – or the library as a weather shelter.

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