The Human Library—Borrow A Person Instead Of A Book

There is a movement that originated in Denmark, where instead of borrowing a book to read a story, you borrow a person instead. The idea, established in 2000, is to “publish people as open books” so that a person can ask questions of someone’s life and experience and understand issues better. These Human Library projects now exist in over 70 countries.

The concept is simple—that stereotypes can be challenged when hearing stories from real people. The non-profit organization called The Human Library, hosts events “where readers can borrow human beings serving as open books and have conversations they would not normally have access to. Every human book from our bookshelf, represent a group in our society that is often subjected to prejudice, stigmatization or discrimination because of their lifestyle, diagnosis, belief, disability, social status, ethnic origin etc.”

So, you can sit down with “Alcoholic”, “Autism”, “Bipolar” and “Body Mod Extreme” (someone with extreme body modifications) through every range of human condition imaginable—”Molested”, “Muslim”, “Naturist”, “Polyamorous”, etc—and ask questions, and hear people’s stories. The tagline is “unjudge someone.”

Much how normal libraries and bookshops operate there is also A Book of The Month, where people are featured as human books, such as The Holocaust Survivor in California/the Netherlands and The Transformista from The Human Library in Lima, Peru.

The project has lots of practical applications too. A new partnership with The University of Glasgow is encouraging 300 medical students to become readers in The Human Library to learn the skills needed as future doctors.

Dr. Lynsay Crawford, University Lecturer said that “we hope to run the program every year so all Glasgow graduates will learn how to ‘unjudge’. This will benefit not only our students but also the patients and colleagues they will encounter in their future careers. Medical students need to have a wide knowledge base that can be learnt from traditional books, but to be truly effective and compassionate doctors they need to develop more nuanced skills—communication, empathy, listening, reflection—and what better way to achieve that, than through interactions, and connections, with people and their lived experience—the human books.”