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Book bounty-hunter Mirium Alzeera is sparking a love for reading with Booksnessi, a book-lending community centred on one of today’s popular reading spots – the coffee shop.
Started in 2017, the community found a home at the Higher Grounds café in Tubli in 2019 and is launching a new initiative to help those with extensive personal libraries lend out books from their collection.
The community originally started with Mirium posting reviews of some of her favourite books to the @booksnessi Instagram account, and when the eclectic coffee shop opened, she jumped at the opportunity to live out her childhood dream of starting a library.
“The name came from my belief that books are the epitome of awesome-ness and my love at the time, of plurals that end in an ‘i’,” the 25-year-old UK-based Bahraini doctor told GulfWeekly.
“So put together, Booksnessi was born. Since we started a physical library at the café, 255 books have been borrowed, and this is despite the pandemic which has loomed over the majority of the Booksnessi library’s life.”
Mirium has also created a digital database of her books on Libib, a popular library-cataloguing platform.
Readers can either explore the books currently displayed on the top floor at Higher Grounds, or request a specific book from her database, which will then be added to the common shelf.
To borrow the books, bibliophiles pay a BD3 deposit at the café, which is then returned in full, provided the book is returned within a month. If it’s taken out for more than a month, they get BD2 back.
“My siblings, Saeed and Sarah, have been my backbone when running the library,” Mirium added.
“I wish I was in Bahrain full-time to be able to bring books to the shelf as soon as someone asks for them, but since I am away, I am forced to wait until a few requests accumulate before I ask one of my siblings if they would not mind updating the shelf.
“A major advantage of running the library from abroad is that I get exposed to so many more books by living in the UK than I would by living in Bahrain. I also get to fill my suitcase up with books when I come back home and share whatever treasure I have found in my travels.”
Mirium has also organised the posts on her Instagram, using an innovative hashtagging system.
Interested readers who may want to search her reviews for a particular author just need to search for the hashtag #booksnessi_ followed by the first letter of the author’s last name.
Her most popular books so far have been Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid.
“People in Bahrain like to read popular fiction, but the more a person reads, the more specific their choice in books becomes,” she observed.
Recently, just over two years since the library started, Mirium realised that she had a small yet sizeable fund of late fees, which negated her philosophy of the initiative being not-for-profit.
So, she started ‘Booksnessi x You,’ a programme under which bookworms can lend out their book to the community, and receive a BD3 deposit for their book.
To enrol, they have to ensure there is at least one person interested in borrowing the book and then reach out to Mirium via the Booksnessi Instagram. Once approved, they will receive BD3 for their book, which they need to return when they want to retrieve the book.
“Our only rule is that there needs to be a named person who wants to borrow the book, just to make sure it does not stay on the shelf indefinitely,” she explained.
“The best part about this is that technically, as long as the owner is willing to lend the book, you would have access to so many books than you otherwise would have, all for free!”
Mirium hopes to further expand and connect the bibliophile community with the new initiative.
“Reading and loving books is the best way to be part of our community,” she said.
“I love getting book recommendations from our patrons and I love hearing their thoughts on the books they have read. Of course, borrowing books from Booksnessi is wonderful, as is offering a bit of your library.
“I’ve also been trying to think of an organised way to get books delivered to people’s homes. I would also love to see other people do the same or make similar projects in other cafes in Bahrain.
“I know a lot of other people have bigger, more interesting libraries than I do, and it would be lovely to have a larger book lending community.”
For more details, follow @booksnessi on Instagram.
