A library pop-up opening in Ayr hopes to take readers on a journey somewhere new this summer.
Christina Riley, from Troon, is launching the latest instalment of The Nature Library at Narture Café in Ayr’s Sandgate.
The reference library, which opens until the end of the month, aims to encourage readers to discover connections between land, sky and sea through nature books.
Christina, who works as a photographer, started the library pop-up in 2019 after realising that the books she was reading- mainly ‘nature writing’- was influencing her work and the way she went about her day to day life.
She wanted to share these books with others and set up The Nature Library for two weeks at Civic House in Glasgow.
And following its roaring success, the library has been moving around Scotland ever since, from Glasgow and Edinburgh to Pitlochry, Dunbar, Mull, Oban, Ullapool, Birnam and Arran, and now to Ayr.
Christina said: “Nature writing can be anything from travel writing, a memoir of someone in a particular location and how that location affected them, or writing about the landscape and something that really focuses on a place within a landscape, like a mountain.
“I was always recommending and lending books to people and I thought ‘wouldn’t it be nice if these were just all in one room and people could come and visit’.
“I started it in a Glasgow location and I didn’t know if anyone was going to come but it went really well so I just kept taking it to different places.
“I grew up in Irvine and moved back to Ayrshire in 2020 so I’ve just been really wanting to find an Ayrshire location and bring the books here.
“I’ve been aware of what Narture have been doing for a while and a good friend of mine did an exhibition there, so I thought ‘this is perfect’.
“I love what they’re doing - utilising these spaces and letting members of the community show what’s happening.”
Christina says The Nature Library features a real mix of genres, from classic and contemporary to fiction and non fiction, memoir, and poetry. People do donate books, so it’s less about ‘these are my favourite books’ as it belongs to everyone,” she said.
“It’s a reference library so you can’t take the books home but you can sit for as long as you like. I always have bookmarks so I tell people to chuck a bookmark in and they can come back to it.
“It’s there for the whole month so that people do have time to go back.”
The Nature Library will run at Narture Café, at 22 Sandgate, from June 1-30. Christina is also initiating an open call to local writers, encouraging them to submit work on the theme of Mother / Nurture, to be displayed at Narture Café.
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