Alford Library

Just 2 weeks to go until the begins! Get ready to join Read to the Beat at .🎵🎸🥁

Discover amazing books, collect rewards, and celebrate the power of reading all summer long.

Sign up from Saturday 4th July. ✍️

Fairy tales were not always soft bedtime stories. Before they became polished, colorful, and harmless, they lived in dark forests, abandoned cottages, cursed towers, poisoned apples, wicked bargains, and strange transformations.

The Brothers Grimm preserved that older world.

Their stories remind us that fairy tales were born from fear, warning, survival, and wonder. Children wandered into woods. Wolves spoke. Witches waited behind candy walls. Princesses slept under curses. Frogs became princes. Names held power. Apples carried death.

On Fairy Day, we celebrate not only sparkling wings and magical dust, but also the shadowy roots of folklore — the place where beauty and terror walk together beneath the moon.

Our recent visitor who gave a reading at the library 😀

Just one week to go until the second edition of 'After The Funeral' is available on Kindle! New paperback edition also now available.

This first book in the Julia Butler Series is a multigenerational story of love, loss and family secrets, moving between 2002 and 1943. Ideal if you enjoy sagas and emotional page-turners.

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Can you relate? 😅

Tea time teaser! I know many of you enjoy wordplay, the English language, and wasting time on the Internet, so here is a fun distraction for you to momentarily ponder.

I try to stop at the end of chapters, but sometimes I'm a rebel and stop at scene breaks.

During WWII, the US military was dangerously short on intelligence after decades of underfunding. The unlikely solution? Librarians. They were recruited to gather vital information from library shelves, and some were sent overseas as spies, crossing enemy lines to smuggle documents out of occupied Europe.

As libraries face shrinking budgets today, this story is a powerful reminder that they are far more than quiet reading rooms. Read the full article to discover the incredible untold story of America's librarian spies.

Read more: https://magazine.1000libraries.com/how-librarians-became-americas-greatest-asset-in-wwii-intelligence/

“Teacher, I’ve read so many books… but I’ve forgotten most of them. So what’s the point of reading?”

That was the question of a curious student to his Master. The teacher didn’t answer. He just looked at him in silence.

A few days later, they were sitting by a river, suddenly, the old man said:
“I’m thirsty. Bring me some water… but use that old strainer lying there on the ground.”

The student looked confused. It was a ridiculous request. How could anyone bring water in a strainer full of holes?

But he didn’t dare argue.

He picked up the strainer and tried.
Once. Twice. Over and over again…

He ran faster, angled it differently, even tried covering holes with his fingers. Nothing worked. He couldn’t hold a single drop.

Exhausted and frustrated, he dropped the strainer at the teacher’s feet and said:
“I’m sorry. I failed. It was impossible.”

The teacher looked at him kindly and said:
“You didn’t fail. Look at the strainer.”

The student glanced down… and noticed something.
The old, dark, dirty strainer was now shining clean. The water, though it never stayed, had washed it over and over until it gleamed.

The teacher continued:
“That’s what reading does. It doesn’t matter if you don’t remember every detail. It doesn’t matter if the knowledge seems to slip through, like water through a strainer…

Because while you read, your mind is refreshed.
Your spirit is renewed.
Your ideas are oxygenated.
And even if you don’t notice it right away, you’re being transformed from the inside out.”

That’s the true purpose of reading.
Not to fill your memory…
but to cleanse and enrich your soul.

-Author Unknown-