Let Them Have Books

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 Let Them Have Books: A Mission to Read, a classic among French librarians that is now available for the first time in English. Originally published in 1987, Let Them Have Books 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.

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, What Gets Then To Read Like That: The Story of the Woman Who Got Millions of Children to Read, is also available from Litwin Books.

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.