SBAPP! The Social Bookshop and the Public Library

The project was born as a desire to bring together those cultural and social places that are bookstores and libraries, scattered over the vast Italian territory.

Bookstores and libraries that, aware of their role as catalysts of culture, information and freedom, engage in the promotion and organization of projects (author presentations, exhibitions, collective readings, courses, workshops, social events…) that can connect people, actively involve citizens in the life of communities, the primary value of sociality. Bookstores and libraries, by vocation, are places where relationships occur naturally, not forced by a passive sense of unidirectional passage of information or goods, but places where plots are woven, dialogues are created, and threads of one’s life are woven together. They are free admission places, as on the other hand is the (Renaissance) square.

The Social Bookshop and the Public Library intends to highlight the gratuitousness of the civic dimension inherent in bookshops and libraries, occasions to meet, to invite people to participate and to discover themselves as citizens of the world, all deserving to link their lives with those of others.

It is the role, not the location, often central to the urban fabric or located at sensitive points in the so-called suburbs, that constitutes libraries and bookstores as true points of social aggregation, so much so that they have made the agora-typically the fulcrum around which cities wind- plural agoras, spaces capable of dialoguing with communities.

The project The Social Bookshop and the Public Library is the brainchild of Francesca Boragno, a historical bookseller in Busto Arsizio (Varese province). The project is meant to be a tribute to the professionalism of the bookseller and that of the librarian, who play a real cultural and social role, far beyond the purely economic aspect of the store or mere preservation and storage of objects-books. It is the people who make the places, and so it is also the case in the bookstore and the library.