the biblioburro

Remember that marvelous story from last fall, about a group of 'illegal restorers' from a Parisian secret society who snuck into the Panthéon, set up a hidden workshop under the dome, and painstakingly fixed the monument's broken clock? Well, the way I felt about them is pretty much how I feel about Luis Soriano, the man behind the Biblioburro.

Sweating already under the unforgiving sun, he strapped pouches with the word “Biblioburro” painted in blue letters to the donkeys’ backs and loaded them with an eclectic cargo of books destined for people living in the small villages beyond.

His choices included “Anaconda,” the animal fable by the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga that evokes Kipling’s “Jungle Book”; some Time-Life picture books (on Scandinavia, Japan and the Antilles); and the Dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language.

The donkeys are named Alfa and Beta. Boo to the NYT for dragging in the obligatory García Márquez reference (oh these quaint magical realist Latin American villages &c!) but it's still a wonderful story.