Very excited to see the first Samhain issue from Inglenook Lit. If you are craving to read - or write - surreal, witchy, divine, gutting, dreamy, magical stories, please check them out. Sasha Bailyn is tending a wonderful hearth here for witch and witch-adjacent writers. They are taking submissions.

My cat doesn’t even know who Trump is

(I also, of course, humbly suggest this for any book lover on your holiday shopping list. It's on Amazon, if it's not at your local bookstore).

I realize we’re close to Christmas, but as I try to build my following here, I’d like to gift three of these hardcovers from my own personal stash.

Leave a comment here, telling me about your favorite library or library memory. I’ll use an RNG to pick winners <3

Or the Horse Library in Ethiopia, where librarians saddle up crates of books on literal horses to deliver them to kids who live nomadically in the hills.

There was a civil war in Ethiopia from 2020-2022.

They didn't stop.

(The below is Legesse Janfa, a librarian with Ethiopia Reads).

Some of these libraries restored my faith in humanity, like the one run by Jose Alberto Gutierrez, a man in Bogota who made his neighborhood's first library out of books he found (and cleaned) while on his day job: collecting garbage.

There’s something so tantalizing about the idea of a rack of knowledge just sitting out there, that only a rare few souls have accessed. It’s a bibliophile's dream to come upon such a place.

The Sakya Monastery in Tibet contains books that are thousands of years old, but have never been translated

Some were easy to find; mysterious, but historically significant, like the Vatican Secret Archives.

Others had me hunting for info on people who, I realized, didn't want to be found (or couldn't be, such Bruno Shröder, who died before he could name an heir to his, ah, "eccentric" home library)

I do not have an additional joke.

I would like to genuinely applaud all serious news outlets for their impartial coverage of this historic event.