Kids books have always been part of our pop-up free library. But it’s been a long time since we’ve put them front and centre – we last did it in 2018 at the Blazing Swan Kraken event in Fremantle. Back then we set up a market tent and spread our boxes of books on a rug on the ground. We’d brought along around 400 books and gifted at least 250 of them.
Camp Bibliophilia is laying plans to do a kids books library again, possibly on the sidelines of a Blazing Swan fundraiser, and – if there is one this year – at a picnic to be organised by Blazing Swan for parents prior to the next Blazing Swan 2026 event. When it comes to the actual Blazing Swan event we’ll go back to our normal arrangement – there’ll be some kids books at floor level in each one of our tents rather than all being set up in one particular tent. That means that as parents (accompanied by children) move through our tents there’ll be something for the kids wherever the parents go.
As we’ve done in previous years we’ve curated our collection. Some authors and some publishers have been excluded. John Mack is ready to discuss those decisions with people, but essentially it’s our decision about our privately funded library and we’re not telling people how they should think about the excluded books or authors. What people WILL see is the books we chosen, which we hope are a fair representation of the values that we wish to share.
