[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto Public Library gives commuters a ticket to read"

[rfmcdonald]

Jim Coyle's Toronto Star article is delightful.

Besides being a sweet way to travel, trains are machines made for stories.

The clickety-clack cadence, the lulling sway, the passing landscape of pastoral calm or gritty urban clutter — the factories, apartment blocks, laundry lines and fleeting glimpses of other people’s lives.

A mind in transit is a mind ripe for narrative.

Stephen Leacock knew that, or he wouldn’t have started a story by writing, “It leaves the city every day about five o’clock in the evening, the train for Mariposa.”

Anne Bailey knows it, too.

Bailey is Toronto Public Library’s director of branch libraries. It was her idea to have the library install a book-lending kiosk at Union Station, where there are trainfuls of prospective readers.

“We’re tossing ideas around all the time,” she says of TPL, which watches what other libraries are doing; what banks or airports are trying in an increasingly mobile, self-service world; what other service providers are offering wherever people congregate or pass through in numbers.