In the age of Amazon and the Internet, the idea of going to a public library to borrow a book may seem ever more unusual and old-fashioned in many parts of the world, but one country, at least, is holding on it tightly:the Czech Republic? There are libraries everywhere you look in the country. There is one library for every 1,971 Czech citizens—four times as many, relative to population, as the average European country, and 10 times as many as the United States, which has one for every 19,583 people.
Why so many Czech libraries? Well, for decades they were mandatory—every community, from a big city down to a tiny village, was required by law to have one. The law was enacted in 1919, soon after Czechoslovakia emerged as an independent country. The library law survived the German occupation and the breakup with Slovakia in the early 1990s. What it couldn't survive was budget pressure. To save money, the requirement was dropped in 2001, when there were about 6,019 libraries in the country;since then, about 11 percent have been combined or closed.
Now, the surviving Czech libraries are doing what they can to stay vibrant (生气勃勃的) and relevant. They serve as local meeting places, They organize reading clubs and art exhibits and offer computer literacy (读写)courses, and they welcome groups of schoolchildren and retirtees during the day. But mostly, they do what 92 percent of Czechs still want them to go on doing: They lend books.
