Let Them Have Books

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>What role do books have in children's lives? How do libraries and librarians help foster a lifelong love of reading? Librarian and activist Geneviève Patte addresses the questions in </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>Let Them Have Books: A Mission to Read</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> a classic among French librarians that is now available for the first time in English. Originally published in 1987 </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>Let Them Have Books</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> was revised in 2012 to account for the new challenges and possibilities that have been introduced by the digital age. A staunch advocate for the rights of all children to have access to libraries Patte recounts her experiences as a pioneering librarian who helped to establish the concept of children's libraries in France as well as internationally.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>Geneviève Patte's experience in the United States as a Fulbright scholar in the 1950s and travels throughout the world have confirmed her dedication to creating the library as a welcoming place particularly for immigrants and children from marginalized communities. For Patte the library is somewhere that everyone belongs and everyone's voice can be heard. Patte is currently the director of La Bibliothèque Ronde in the working-class Parisian suburb of Clamart. A translation of her biography </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>What Gets Then To Read Like That: The Story of the Woman Who Got Millions of Children to Read</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> is also available from Library Juice Press.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>Tegan Raleigh is a translator from French and German based in Eugene Oregon. Her translations include memoirs novels short stories and literary essays and her work has been recognized by the American Literary Translators Association and PEN America. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa and a PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Santa Barbara. She lived in Paris for two years conducting doctoral research that she's currently using to write a literary biography of the 17th-century author Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy.</span></p>