National Year of Reading – Letterbox Library

Katy
0:11

Hi, I'm Katie and I'm Ali and welcome to Mostly Book Talk. This episode is one of a series we are doing about book-related charities and what they are doing in the National Year of Reading. In this episode, we're delighted to talk to Fen Coles from Letterbox Library. We are really pleased to have with us today Dr. Fen Coles, who is the co-director of the Letterbox Library. So welcome, Fen. Do you want to just start off by telling us about the Letterbox Library? We we know that it's got a long history. So tell us what the Letterbox Library is and what you do. Definitely.

Fen
0:50

I'm going to start by saying how much I've enjoyed the podcast series, though. Oh, brilliant. Yeah, thank you. I've been stacking episodes over the last fortnight and was listening to the Books for Keats one yesterday, which was great because I'm a big fan of their work. So yeah, I've been really enjoying it. Letterbox Library, yes, it's ancient. So it was set up in 1983. So the original impetus changed over the year, but a very brief summary is there were two single parents, two women called Ivan and Gillian. And they both had daughters, and they felt that the children's books that their daughters had access to weren't showing girls in interesting roles, you know, that was very kind of passive, very focused on their appearances, etc. So they decided they were going to set up a book club. And they did set up a book club initially just from their front room in Hackney, and they produced a mail order catalogue that had just 16 books on it. However, very soon after they set up, friends of theirs said, Well, you know, that's what you would like your children to access. But what we would like is books that actually reflect back our families. So they quickly went from being called an anti-sexist book club, I think it was called, to an anti-sexist and multicultural book club. And it's been, as a bookseller, it's always been really, really organic. So its subtitle has changed many times over the years, and it's grown and grown and grown and grown. So where we are now is that we are an online bookseller. We mainly sell to primary and early years. And we are interested in representative titles across the board. So inclusive titles for us would include books that have got disabled protagonists, books with racially minoritized characters, books showing diverse families with LGBTQ characters, books with neurodivergent leads, books showing communities that are underrepresented, like refugee and migrants or Roma Traveller Gypsy. So we we treat inclusion very, very broadly. And of course, the language around inclusion changes over the years. So we you know we try and adapt and it keeps us on our toes. We're very organic.

Ali
2:54

Um yeah, so it evolves as the world has evolved, you've got it.

Fen
2:57

It does, it does. And then the other thing we're known for in terms of the books we choose is also our social justice books, which I think was why we were then asked to set up and run the little Rebels Award for Radical Children's Fiction, which is another thing that we do. So in the main, we're booksellers, but we do do lots of other things as well. So key key to how books end up on our website is our selection process. So this is the thing that makes us popular with teachers in early years and with schools. We only approve for sale about 30 to 35% of the books that publishers send us.

Katy
3:30

Right.

Fen
3:30

And that's because the books go through this very, very fussy selection procedure for which we are totally indebted to our review team. So we have a review team made up of 20 to 25 volunteers, many of whom have been with us for a long time, but we we bring on new people all the time, some of whom you've had on this podcast. So Dr. Darren Chetty is one of our reviewers. We also, lucky us, Patrice Lawrence joined our review team before she published Orange Boy. So we've now got the children's laureate. So that's that's very special. I've just asked her whether she's still happy to go on reviewing. I'm very happy to say she said yes.

Ali
4:08

I think she's having a lot of those conversations, isn't she? Where people are like, Well, you still have time to yeah, yeah, we rumbled her actually.

Fen
4:15

I didn't know we did, and then we had to keep it secret. Yeah, we weren't very subtle how we went about it. But I'm so pleased. She's such an amazing advocate. No, we we cried when we heard the news. It's feels really big.

Katy
4:25

Yeah, it does feel really good. In terms of your reviewers, how do you work with them?

Fen
4:29

So, how it works is publishers approach us with titles they'd like us to sell, but we also source a lot of books ourselves, so we do a huge amount of research before we get even to the review stage. So the books come into our office, we then send the books out to these 2025 reviewers who mostly reflect back our market. So they're mostly teachers, librarians, we've got some young people and children, social workers. They're all broadly um involved with children and young people, or they're educational experts of some sort. So they receive books in the post from us and they read a book. They are issued with a set of criteria which addresses both equalities and inclusion issues, but also quality, because we're not interested in tokenism at all. Um, they literally handwrite a review. It's very old school, it's working very well for us. And they might have one book or they might have up to five books. They send those books back in the actual pigeon post and it comes back to us, and we basically seek a minimum of three sets of reviews on picture books, two reviews on chapter books, mainly because of time. So we then make a final decision about whether that book has been approved or rejected. If that book's been approved, we have all these shelves in our office that is just full of approved books under kind of subject headings. And what happens is that we very regularly look at which books we can add to our website and also either individually, but also books we can add to our book packs that are really popular with schools. So we add those onto the website. If possible, we can we will incorporate directly the uh the feedback from the reviewers, but essentially we have this huge library of approved books from which we then select again for the website.

Katy
6:12

So not all approved books get onto the website?

Fen
6:15

No, there's effectively three filtering processes. The first one is that the books have to get through me, not because it has to get through one of us, it just happens to be me. Then then they get sent to the reviewers. That's the second filtering process, and then the third one is which books we then elect to have on the website from those approved books.

Ali
6:33

And is that because you might have something with a similar theme already, or it how is that third third level monitored?

Fen
6:40

So it might be because we've got a particular theme going already. It might be because something really topical has come up and we want to respond by putting particular books on the website. It might be something as kind of basic, for example, our early years market really fluctuates. So sometimes it's quite quiet. When it's busier and noisier, then we would aim to put more board books, for example, on the website. So lots of lots of factors come into play.

Katy
7:07

And how many books have you got all together on your website that are active in your catalogue? I'm just asking my co-director.

Fen
7:15

So currently it's 400. Oh, right. Okay, wow. I wonder what's actually on the bookshelves. I'm looking at the bookshelves.

Ali
7:21

You look like you're in a little cubbyhole with the different.

Fen
7:24

I know. I feel like I'm in a cubbyhole. So it's like a mini warehouse. So we're full of shelves. We recycle everything. So you can see all those boxes at the top. Those are the boxes that we pack our books in for schools. This right behind me is actually stock that we've approved for sale. So we buy in in batch, so we have kind of multiple copies of titles. We've got 700 products, but that includes packs. Ah, okay. Okay, so the website's got 700 products, but that includes our book packs as well. So we're just in this one mini warehouse office, which is in a bigger building called Mainyard Studios, which is full of little creative businesses and kind of startups.

Katy
8:04

I mean, there's kind of fluctuating views on how representative and diverse books are doing. What's your perspective on that?

Fen
8:12

Um, so I mean, I just think a little bit, my my background was in the charity sector before I came here, sort of working around women's and LGBTQ rights in different projects. And I kind of feel a little bit like the equalities work I was engaged in. The charity sector, interests in equalities has kind of peaks and troughs, really. Yeah. It's very cyclical, which is which is very frustrating when you're dealing with people's lives, obviously. So I think a lot of people in our industry who were interested, for example, in racially minoritized creatives and representation would say that there was a little bit of a peak about 2018 to about 2023, in the middle of which you have obviously the Black Lives Matter movement and lockdown, which also impacted, I think, on how people taught and thought about inclusion. And I think during that peak, we had many more creatives of colour being welcomed into the industry, which doesn't in itself, of course, translate into characters of colour in books, but it can and often does. And I think publishers were more receptive to new voices and perhaps voices they hadn't been listening to before. And I think publishers wanted to respond to people's concerns around black lives and around underrepresentation in general. And I would say that now it's kind of waning off a little bit. So we know that there are creators of colour who had been brought in very enthusiastically, who are having their contracts ended a bit prematurely, or whose marketing budget seems to have shrunk. So I think that's going on. I think it also really depends on what area of inclusion you're you're looking at. I think it's really, really complicated. I think things like the book bans that have been going on in America, for example, have been primarily targeted at LGBTQ plus representative books, but also any books which people have deemed to be kind of critical race theory, which they often misinterpret as just having a black child in a book, right? And I think in this country, um, you know, so in this country, we're always we're very English about our banning. You know, we don't do bans, except we do really, we just do it by the back door. So I think Index on Censorship did a really interesting survey a while ago with librarians, including school librarians, and what they discovered was that librarians were sort of self-selfing in advance, but it's all anecdotal, and we don't have the data to prove this. But the titles that librarians were focusing on and schools under parental pressure were tended to be books with LGBTQ plus representations. So it feels like just as we were getting more of those titles, I think, particularly at the kind of pre-teen range, yeah, these curbs are coming in, but all the curbs are coming in from the back door, you know. So on social media, there's a lot of queer authors speaking out at the moment who had school visits booked and they've been cancelled. There are others that of course have been more successful, it's not entirely bleak, but it feel it it does feel to me like we've got this slight uptick in queer representation. It it lasted a very short period of time, yeah.

Ali
11:21

And there's already a downturn. That reflects, I think, some of the things that we've been hearing and seeing as well. And um who's the author that we interviewed that said they'd had a couple of and as you say, it's very English or very British in that they'll be cancelled for other reasons, you know, budget or school, you know, they nobody's going to say it's because actually your book's got two mums in it. Yeah, which is yeah, was it Ella?

Katy
11:46

No, it was yeah, it was Max and Ella's. Stuck together. Stuck together, that's it.

Ali
11:50

Um that that's now gone on our list for September. So it's a good book and it's a story. The fact that she's got two mums is is kind of irrelevant, really. I mean it's a bit because she's a donor baby, but you know what I mean? It's not the point of the story.

Fen
12:04

Exactly. As with her first book, which is Doughnut Club. Yeah. Yeah, same thing there. Yeah, I think the middle grade authors are really getting a lot of pushback. Simon James Green has had a lot of pushback. But I think I think Sarah Hagger-Holt has also she's also had some really positive stuff as well. I know that none of those authors would want me to suggest that it's so bleak because also that might then disincentivize people from inviting them into their schools at all, you know. But it shouldn't be mixed.

Katy
12:31

Yeah, you do sort of feel like it's hard if you start speaking out about it, then people then think, oh, okay, this could be controversial, and then they self-censor because they want to avoid potentially being controversial, whereas they may just not have thought about it before. It's really, really hard to know what to do.

Fen
12:49

I think it's really hard with lack of evidence as well, you know, because I think, I mean, I wouldn't want to be living in any of the American states where the book bans revert, don't get me wrong. But the thing is, what you have there is that you have particular bits of pernicious legislation which exists on a statute book, um, and parents use it to lobby, you know, in states for public schools to not have certain books in America. And because that that legislation exists and that lobbying is reported and recorded, and action has to be taken, that's all logged, you know. Whereas everything that's going on here, it's all going, it's all sort of very, it's very foggy. It's all very nebulous. And once you have data, I think you can do so much more to kind of agitate against.

Katy
13:31

And it's it's really hard. It is really hard. I see that there's actually quite a lot of effort going into supporting librarians around the whole area, which I think is good, you know, to preempt those situations because it must be very difficult because I think librarians are quite isolated within their school staff group because they're neither one thing, you know, they're professionals in their own right, but then to kind of have this ambiguous position in the school hierarchy. Having that support is, I think, really important. I'm thinking in on a more positive note, it does feel just from looking at the outside, that representation of disability has improved quite a bit. Am I right in that? Do you feel that? Or is it just those are the books I'm seeing?

Fen
14:14

I think that's right. I mean, I think campaigners have um campaigners around disability representation have always favoured a sort of incidental model of inclusion. So for many years, places like Scope Runner project called In the Picture, and it really said that as far as disability representation in children's books goes, it shouldn't be about a child using a wheelchair. There should just be a wheelchair user, for example, yeah, as part of the narrative. And I think we're at a really interesting point now because I actually think we have both types of representation going on, which I rather favour because what you have is you have titles with disabled representations, which are very cleverly looking back, really, at people who make assumptions about disability. So you you couldn't say they were just incidental under-the-radar representations. So books like the catchpole titles, what happened to you is one of the and you're so amazing. So you're so amazing directly, but gently and very sweetly pokes fun back at the people that look at a disabled child or adult and go, that's amazing that you can even do that. Yeah. And it's done in such a clever way and it's done with such wit. I love that. So you have you have that model of representation going on, which I think is really important for actually recognising and fighting back against, you know, disabledism. And then you do still have this incidental mode of representation, which also has a really important purpose for, like you say, the Max and Eller book, you know, that these aren't books that go on about someone's disability, but there are disabled children and protagonist adults in the mix of the narrative. And I think what's noticeable is that when I started work at Letterboxd, the only disability representation you got really was kind of wheelchair users, which isn't to say we didn't need those, because of course we needed those. But now we not only have children wearing hearing aids, but there are other things being done in picture books that are perhaps more subtle, like representing children with downs, for example. I really noticed that, and that was so needed for so long. And people used to rely on photographics books for that, but actually now illustrators are are illustrating quite rightly children with downs. The illustrators are also finding ways of illustrating children who I know this isn't disability per se, but children who are very anxious, or children who are masking, you know, there are ways of showing that in picture books, which I think is very, very clever. So I think the the range of disabilities that are portrayed is just so much broader now, which is fantastic. And it's also intersectional. At one time, the only disabled characters were wheelchair users and they were white. And I would say that's no longer the case. But I hope that growth, that steady growth can really kind of continues. Because again, sometimes when I read the bookseller and I listen to what disabled authors are saying, they feel that representation is at risk of going as well.

Katy
17:00

Yeah. Yeah, we were reflecting earlier, weren't we, because we were talking about Wolf Siren, because we're in the middle of doing a book guide for it, that both the winner of the medal for writing and for the illustration this year had disabilities represented in them. So visual disability. I think the idea that with Wolf Siren that it wasn't something that was in fantasy that it would be resolved, that actually that it was just an integral part of the story, visual impairment. And then with Kate Rolfe's book, which I've now forgotten the name of Wiggling Words, that was a very positive book about dyslexia and used imagination and visually using the letters and the imagination and very, very striking in that way. But that's in one of the biggest book prizes that that we have. Both of those books represent disability in different ways.

Fen
17:52

It's exciting. It is exciting for those books who've got that profile and very very well deserved as well.

Katy
17:57

You mentioned the Little Rebel Award. Tell us a bit about that, because it's part of what you do and where what's happening with that at the moment.

Fen
18:05

The Little Rebels Award came about in about 2012. I think the first shortlist was in 2013. And it came about through a network of radical booksellers called the Alliance of Radical Booksellers. So they were already running a prize for adult non-fiction called Bread and Roses. And two of the people involved in that network really wanted to have a kind of parallel children's prize for radical literature. So we set that up. We now run it alongside Houseman's Bookshop as well because the prize got too big for us. And then the prize got too big for all of us. So we're actually on hiatus this year while we seek funding. So we've got some bids in at the moment, and hopefully we'll hear in a couple of months or so. But the award just really kind of mushroomed and mushroomed. I think its biggest peak was probably in 2018 when Zayn Ab Miyan won the award for her book, which was then called The Muslims, and it was published by her own publishing company, which was Sweet Apple Books. So the Muslims won the Little Rebels Prize. Hachette spied it and offered her a three-book contract, and it became the Planet Omar series. And then American Penguin also gave her a contract, so Planet Omar went stateside. And now it's in the theatre. So we had a little Little Rebels outing to go and see it at the Unicorn Theatre. There's an amazing, amazing stage production. And Zaynaff has stayed really loyal to the award. She comes to our award nights as often as she can, which is a lot of the time. She's been really good to us, and it's been wonderful seeing her rise. And we, you know, we hope we've formed a little part of that. That was a kind of a peak for the award. And after that, a lot of interest was generated. So more and more publishers submitted. So we've gone past our kind of 10-year time, but we are currently regrouping.

Katy
19:51

So to look out for that for next year, potentially, or the year after?

Fen
19:54

Hopefully, look out for it for next year. You'll get your you'll get your short list of the toppest social justice fiction book for children age ages naught to 12, we go up to. We do have really exciting lists, so yeah.

Ali
20:06

So hopefully the funding will come in and you'll be able to run it again.

Fen
20:10

Yeah. Yeah, I hope so. It's a really good part of my job.

Ali
20:13

So tell it, we're in the national year of reading. Any thoughts or what have you been doing?

Fen
20:18

We're not doing anything different, no. And it's interesting because when I was when I was listening to some of your other podcast interviewees, it was really noticeable to me that lots of other people weren't doing anything different either. I think so many of us are already engaged in work which we think is about promoting reading for pleasure, which is obviously a key part of the year, isn't it? So what we feel here, of course, is that we think that inclusive representation wrapped up in really good stories is a real underpinning for reading for pleasure because we think it's a really key way that you can engage a child in reading. And we also see inclusive books in the kind of I kind of want to reverse that really. So if a child doesn't have access to books that reflect back them, their families, their neighbourhoods, their lives, then there is a risk that they will become disengaged from reading. And you also run the risk that they're just going to get disengaged from the world of books altogether, whether that's authorship, publishing, editorial, book selling, book buying. So there is the risk they will feel that that world doesn't engage with them, doesn't represent them, has nothing to do with them, and is therefore sees them as irrelevant and they say it is irrelevant, which you know just sort of put spells catastrophe to me, really. So that's why we're really careful that when we select inclusive books, that we do use these incredible reviewers who we're just so grateful for. Because they're not just choosing inclusive representations, they're always choosing the best of the best of the best. And we also try to really make sure that we research the titles that end up with the reviewers in the first place very, very widely, so that we're offering children genuine choices. So I think choice is very important if you're going to encourage reading for pleasure, obviously. I know that that seems fairly fundamental. And in fact, very often, not always, but very often, if a book becomes really, really widely available and it ticks our criteria, we probably wouldn't bother listing it. You know, our point is that people have access to those books. In a way, we might end up doing ourselves out of business because we just want them to have those books, you know. We don't mind too much where they get them, but it also keeps us quite athletic in terms of trying to find new books that they may not have heard of. That's interesting.

Katy
22:26

So you you could rule something out because it's too popular or too too high profile.

Fen
22:32

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Not always, but many times we have, yeah.

Ali
22:39

I mean, that's similar to book clubs in schools, actually, the charity that we do is our day job.

Katy
22:44

Yeah, yeah. So we we tend not to include books on our list. We call them our shorthand as supermarket books. But they're the books that have, you know, they're so high profile that they will be the ones that you will find either in supermarkets or in WH Smith's as it was, you know, in their profile fit and that they're just they're they're front everyone, if you've seen any books, you will have seen those. Um because well partly just because it's no fun being part of a book club and being asked to choose from a book that you know you've already may already have read. If you've read one book, that might be it or whatever.

Fen
23:20

Yeah, that's really interesting.

Katy
23:22

So, what happens? Do you ever have your reviewers really violently disagreeing? Oh yeah, my goodness. Do you referee that then?

Fen
23:32

Or so sometimes I'm one of the reviews as well, right? We have internal reviews as well, and I get overall quite a lot, actually, which is very distressing. How do we referee it? So okay, so let's so imagine if you had a picture book and one person said yes, one person said no, one person said not sure. So um, what would happen with that is it would go out to another reviewer.

Katy
23:56

Okay.

Fen
23:57

If we're reaching something like five reviews and there's just really no consensus, I would then talk to my co-director about it, actually. But generally, if we can't reach a consensus, I think we don't take it in the end. But no, they do disagree because the people we ask to be our reviewers, people also come to us say they're all quite gobby, if I'm honest. So they're wanting to have opinions. We want them to have opinions, and my goodness, they're strong. But no, it's perfect for us, so that's great.

Katy
24:29

And what's the most common reason for people saying that they don't think it works? Oh, that's a really good question.

Fen
24:36

Um, okay, so so we have so for example, we have reviewers who are particularly skilled at commenting on disability representations, and they will come back to us and they'll say things like this is meant to be, this is within a realist genre, and nobody's wheelchair would look like that. You know, the wheel wouldn't be like that, the adjustments wouldn't be like that. So they would be critical, particularly of the kind of disability aids, I guess, that are that are being depicted. So that might happen. We have reviewers who say, I don't believe any thought has really been given to the different ethnicities in this book. It just looks like someone has coloured them in different colours. Um, yeah, so you know, just a complete lack of nuance, respect, consideration. We saw we we sometimes have quite interesting ones with reviewers finding representations a bit too saccharine. Families which are just kind of ridiculously perfect. I mean, I think everyone wants to see loving, engaged families in picture books. We all want that. It's that great, but it's when they slightly trip over into that kind of very middle class day out to the park, followed by the art gallery, followed by a baby chino, you know, it doesn't it kind of grates with our reviewers. It grates with our reviewers. I guess they think that's not what we're here to represent either. I think things that that books might get rejected for reasons that we think teachers won't like in particular. So, you know, really poorly executed rhymes is one. So we're presented with rhyming titles, and it's it's a real struggle to dig that rhyme out, you know.

Katy
26:12

There's nothing worse than reading a rhyming book that doesn't scan or just doesn't really properly rhyme, and then you're kind of you're in mid reading it out loud and going, ooh, yeah, yeah.

Ali
26:23

How which part of the country am I from to make this rhyme?

Fen
26:26

Exactly, exactly. And I think it's that thing as well that we're always trying to feed back not just on the representation but also the quality. So you might have a beautifully illustrated black protagonist in a picture book that's yeah, that's wonderfully done, but the the narrative is just really dull, you know, or there's no arc, or there's no character development, then that book doesn't go anywhere. Yeah, we're really sensitive about tokenism, really sensitive about it.

Ali
26:53

And it's interesting if Darren's one of your reviewers, then he will definitely be. We thought we've had a good chat with him before quality of text.

Fen
27:02

Yeah, and we've got Farah, who's be heads the Reflecting Realities Research Project at the Centre of Literacies. I was like almost like an intern for the first couple of years for that project. So I know the detail of how she goes about looking at representation of racially minoritized characters, and it is with a lens, you know, it really is with a lens, yeah. So how do people find you? Okay. It's particularly teachers and librarians who use our site, but of course, we are, you know, we are there for individuals as well. So we have our website, www.lesportslibrary.com, and when you go to that website, you'll also see our schools and early years book packs that, like I said, are particularly popular with teachers. But you can sign up to our blog through the site. You can also sign up to our newsletter. We're on Instagram, we're fairly active on Instagram, so we're on Blue Sky. Yep. Um, which is great because there's much less hate.

Ali
27:54

There is less hate.

Katy
27:55

Because we don't really know where the the teachers still seem to be lurking on X. It was interesting because Teacher Tap did a survey, didn't they? And actually, the teachers' uses they were slower to leave X because I think they had quite a good community on there, but their use now has plummeted and they're more on Instagram and Facebook. Facebook is a teacher. Really? Really, um, which is really interesting. But Blue Sky wasn't surveyed, but it is better because it doesn't have that algorithm, so you can kind of choose what you read rather than just getting stuff shoveled at you.

Fen
28:33

Yeah, I mean, I'm not I'm not missing some of the comments we used to get on X, I have to say, and I think particularly the Little Rebels Award got some got some really horrible stuff thrown at it, mainly whenever we had books with a trans or a LGB representation. But Letterboxd Library used to get quite a lot of grief as well. Yeah, and we're not getting we're not getting that on Blue Sky. So so that's nice. Um, it just feels uh it just feels a little quiet sometimes.

Katy
28:59

Yeah, it is. It does go through very quiet phases. So tell just give us a bit more detail about your packs. So that they're what how many books are in them? Are they age groups? Are they theme groups?

Fen
29:11

Some of them are early years, come as some of them are key stage one and two, some of them are just one key stage or the other. Some of them are themes that you might expect. So, for example, Black History Pack or our disability packs that are all just good stories with disabled leads. We have book packs that are called gender equality packs, which confound gender stereotypes. And then we have ones which probably sound a little bit more curriculum-based. So, for example, we have an early years concert book pack, but of course, what you get is we are studiously giving teachers early years concerts through really good books, but those books also happen to be inclusive as well. We have a Beyond the Secret Garden book pack, which actually is the perfect accompaniment to Karen Sans O'Connor and Darren Chetty's Beyond the Secret Garden book. Yeah, so it takes some of the key titles they've highlighted as excellent titles in the book, and we put them together in a pack, and that pack then comes with their resource book as well. So that's a really good thing for teachers. And Darren and Karen also produce some lesson plans for some of the books, which can kick start discussions. So that's that's a nice um pack. And we've got a new friendship book pack as well, which is proving very popular. So we're on the Reflecting Realities steering group, which we've been on since the project's inception. So we regularly meet up with Farah, who leads the project, to co-curate a Reflecting Realities book pack. So that is for Key Stage One and Two, and again, it's focused on stories predominantly by UK creators, in fact, almost exclusively, very many of which are UK creators of colour. And the point of those stories is that they all have characters of colour who are in leading roles, who have full agency and steer the narrative.

Katy
30:51

Brilliant. Sounds great. So very finally, we're a bit further than halfway through the National Year of Reading. Do you have any hopes for it, its legacy, it's what what it might yet still achieve, any anything like that?

Fen
31:05

I'm worried that you want a short answer. I mean, what I would like the legacy to be is that people have understood that one of the key foundations for reading for pleasure is access to inclusive books. I fear that there are a few things that have happened around the National Year of Reading which actually reduce the provision of books to charitable acts. And that that really bothers me. So if I could just give a couple of examples of that, because I don't want to dismiss every charitable initiative that's about giving books to children, of course, that's not what I'm talking about. But I would question something like, and we all know what I'm talking about, and this is no disservice to the author or to the publisher, but when you have an initiative that decides to give one book to thousands of children, what you're not doing is putting children and young people at the centre of your thinking. You're not engaging in a dialogue with them. You're telling them which book they will read that will open up a pleasure world of reading. And you just can't do that. There are children that won't be able to access that book. There are children who will feel disengaged from it just because they don't particularly like that genre. There are children whose first language isn't English. There are children who might struggle with reading. So that is a great big book gifting, charitable scheme, which I think does a disservice to an ethos of the National Year of Reading. But my other example would be charitable book gifting to schools, because I think there are companies and businesses during this National Year of Reading in particular who have seized this as an opportunity to send in free boxes of books to schools. But you know, what we want is we want books to be seen as absolutely essential to a child's well-being and to their development, but needs to be at the heart of school environments. Books need to be seen as a human right for children. I think what I want is I know that there's been this promise from Rachel Reeves that, you know, every primary school will have a librarian, uh, a library, sorry, by the end of 2029, I think it is. Yeah, I think so.

Ali
33:06

Yeah, by 2030, something like that, isn't it?

Fen
33:08

Yeah, so and I think if if there's money going into that, which which we've been told there will be, we don't know the detail of it, three things really need to happen. So the first is that I think schools need to be funded to actually have a library space. So that doesn't mean renaming a small classroom reading corner, the library. Then they need funding for professional trained librarians who can create magic in schools. And then they need funding for books. And the the book budget absolutely has to be ring-fenced. I don't see how you can play with that. It's so essential to children's well-being. And if you had all those three things in place and properly funded, what I know would happen is that those really skilled, knowledgeable professional librarians would be in dialogue with their school community, with the children and the young people that their school serves, that together they would produce a library of books that is going to meet the needs of that community. And I think anything less than that, it's not okay really. I don't think, I don't think reading schools is being taken seriously if if you do anything less than that. It's it's a fundamental right, you know.

Ali
34:12

Without a librarian and without a budget for books, we were talking about this that there'll probably be some like little collections for 2026 and then nothing new again till the next time that somebody goes, we should have a year of reading.

Katy
34:26

I think that the the issue of librarians is just absolutely key. Every school is different, every school community is different. It's also partly the social nature of reading in that once a book, if it catches on, then you want to to build on that and to go, oh yeah, you know, well, here are some more books that if you like that, you might like this.

Fen
34:46

And I think that social reading is really key, isn't it? And that's one of that's been part of Patrice Lawrence's manifesto that we create social spaces for books and that that's how people learn, and that's how you engage more readers, and those social spaces are brilliantly suited to a school or early years environment.

Katy
35:01

Well, let's hope that there is a stronger legacy. I think people have been saying again and again, libraries and librarians, it's a statutory requirement in a prison, it should be a statutory requirement in a school. And that's a sort of good starting point. I mean, it sounds ridiculous that you're even talking about it, actually. I know, doesn't it?

Ali
35:21

They written them out, didn't they? They written them out in the kind of to put um learning centres in and fill it with computers and threw the books in the bin.

Katy
35:28

And also just that the sort of bulge in terms of school numbers meant that every room was being used for classrooms. I've seen a lot of teachers saying this year that their libraries are being dismantled and that they're being put in corridors and stuff because you know the room's been designated for something else, a breakout space or this, that, and the other, and that's just been seen as okay. So anyway, let's not end on a on a negative note. I mean, it's amazing. I think how many years has letterbox been around now? Oh, 1983. What's the full 43 years?

Fen
36:08

43.

Ali
36:09

That's a brilliant achievement. Brilliant.

Fen
36:10

It's an amazing achievement. Thank you. I wish I could take credit, but I can't. But no, I'm I'm delighted that Letterbox still thrives, and we're yeah, we've we're very keen to preserve its legacy. In fact, our we we kept a copy of every book we've ever sold since 1983, and that archive is now being looked after by Karen Sands O'Connor. It's gone to the University of Sheffield, and she's going to be opening the doors to that collection so that teachers can come in and see what inclusive texts have looked like over the years and have discussions around those. So, yeah, really, it's really exciting. Oh, that's amazing.

Ali
36:42

That's great. That's a good home for it.

Katy
36:44

Yeah. Brilliant. Yeah. Well, thank you very much. And thank you. Look forward to seeing you in other places.