Insult, Injury and Innovation

It was bad enough when the town of Westbury-sub-Mendip, in Somerset, England lost their classic red telephone booth but when they were cut out of the bookmobile route things had gone too far.  Talk about from bad to worse...circumstances had gone too far and the locals decided to take matters into their own hands.  

In 2002 there were 95,000 red phone boxes across England but, with the rise of cell phones, no one was using them anymore.  The problem is they are so darn cute, no at all like our tacky blue scratched plastic versions (remember them?).  
British Telecommunications (BT) had removed over 31,00o of the unused ‘kiosks’ when villagers started to miss their familiar landmarks.  BT came up with a plan (known in England as a scheme) allowing village councils to adopt the booths for one pound and keep them for “aesthetic or heritage reasons,” according to the BBC.  

With a glut of phone boxes on their hands, BT decided on a competition (always a good plan in bad times) for the best phone box use (other than as a phone box).  According to Lesley Taylor at The Star, the competition was the talk of the town during a summer tea party (yes, they really do have tea parties) when Janet Fisher came up with the “book exchange” idea.  A mini-library was born.  I kid you not.  The booth holds about 150 items (including movies and music) and is open 24 hours a day.  A red box is conveniently located on the floor and contains the children’s section.  A simple swap allows residents to leave the books they’ve finished and collect the books they want.   Parish councillor, Bob Dolby is the “unofficial custodian of the library, since its at the end of his garden”.  Dolby comments that business was brisk and residents were treating the booth with respect.  He also noted that the sturdy construction of the kiosk has kept out the rain and damp and the books were doing fine.

The blog Out of Print reports that 770 villages have now contacted BT to adopt libraries of their own.  At the opening of a new/old library booth in Staplehay, Janet Fisher explained that she had gotten her idea after reading “The Lonely Phone Booth”, a picture book written by Peter Ackerman.  Ackerman tells the story of a New York City phone booth that is also neglected with the rise of cell phone.  But one day an electric storm shuts down the city cellular network and the phone booth comes to the communication rescue -  phone booths of the world, unite!  
So, as it turns out, the hero of our story is once again an author and a book.

By the way, Westbury-sub-Mendip won the BT prize for innovative use of the phone box and collected 500 pounds.  Maybe they could line the village with phone kiosks and create a research library?