The Library That Floats

In the far north of Norway, where the coastline breaks into thousands of islands, a boat called the Epos has spent more than sixty years doing something unusual: delivering books.

The Epos is a library that floats. Each autumn it leaves the mainland loaded with around six thousand volumes and sets out on a route that takes it to more than one hundred and fifty communities, many of them home to fewer than twenty families. Some stops have no shop, no school and no road out. For the children who live there, the arrival of the boat is the arrival of the year's reading.

The service began in 1959, when three county councils agreed that people living on remote islands should not be cut off from books simply because a road had never been built. At first the crew worried that the scheme was too ambitious. Instead, it proved so popular that librarians began receiving requests months in advance, with children asking for particular titles to be carried on the next voyage.

Life aboard is not glamorous. The librarians sleep in narrow cabins, work in a cramped reading room lined with shelves, and must sometimes wait out storms in harbour, losing days from a schedule that has no spare ones. Yet the crew describe the work as the most rewarding in the profession. They know their readers by name. They remember which child finished a whole series in one winter, and which grandmother has been waiting all year for the next volume of poetry.

Norway now has fine roads, fast broadband and electronic books. The Epos, remarkably, still sails. Its supporters argue that a library is not only a place where books are kept, but an event — and an event, unlike a website, has to arrive.