Contents
We currently have well over 17,000 books for adults and children, in more than 120 languages and dialects. These are listed in the next column.
Subjects range from fiction to biography, sport, crafts, art, travel, poetry, history, music.... you name it and it's quite probably on a shelf somewhere.
Many of the children's picture books are not for loan as they are very expensive to replace if lost. We encourage families to read together in the library and see it as a second home.
In addition we have a wide range of dictionaries (not for loan) and language resources as well as some DVDs
We also have a few journals - Race and Class being the one with the longest complete run. Others include Banipal, Index on Censorship and some music journals such as Sangeet Natak.
Membership
Library membership costs £5 per year -
Free for those awaiting decisions on their asylum applications and for NHS workers
Afrikaans - Albanian - Amharic - Amsterdams - Antwerps - Arabic - Armenian - Bahasa Indonesia - Basque - Belarusian - Bengali - Bosnian - Brabants - Braille - Breton - Bulgarian - Cadino - Catalan - Chinese - Choctaw - Croatian - Czech - Danish - Dari - Doric - Drents - Dutch - Dzongkha - English - Esperanto - Estonian - Faroese - Farsi - Finnish - French - Frisian - Fula/Fulani - Galician - Geordie - Georgian - German - Greek - Gronings - Gujarati - Haags - Hebrew - Herero - Hindi - Hungarian - Icelandic - Irish - Italian - Japanese - Jersey French - Khmer - Klingon - Korean - Kurdish - Lao - Latin - Latvian - Limburgs - Lingala - Lithuanian - Luxembourgish - Macedonian - Malagasy - Malay - Malayalam - Maltese - Maori - Marathi - Mongolian - Montenegrin - Nepalese - Norwegian - Nyanja - Orkney - Oromiffa - Oshindonga - Papiamento - Papua New Guinea Pidgin - Pashto - Polish - Portuguese - Punjabi - Romanian - Russian - Sanskrit - Scots Gaelic - Serbian - Shetlandic - Shona - Sinhalese - Slovak - Slovene - Somali - Spanish - Sranatongo - Swahili - Swedish - Sylheti - Tagalog - Tamil - Thai - Tibetan - Tigrinya - Turkish - Twents - Twi - Ukrainian - Urdu - Utregs - Vietnamese - Welsh - Westvlams - Xhosa - Yiddish - Yorkie - Yoruba - Zeeuws - Zulu
activities at the library
From time to time we hold activities such as poetry events, talks on local history or world festivals, language tasters and related subjects. We welcome enquiries from people wishing to hold languages classes at the library. We have a classroom to hire by the hour for those looking for space to give language classes or hold meetings. We will shortly have a second room available for private consultations, meetings with council workers or other agencies.
If you wish to hire a space, please drop in at the library and have a word with Joe or drop us an email.
The Society of Authors North East group also held occasional meetings at the library when we were in Newcastle.
We hope they will come again soon.
In January we plan to hold a Spanish/English language exchange where people can meet and chat in both languages, tell stories, help each other with language questions and probably tell bilingual jokes!
Newsletter
We publish an occasional newsletter and would be happy to add reviews, comments, and articles from people visiting the library. Please get in touch if you'd like to write something for us.
Volunteering
The library is run by a team of around 30 volunteers from 15 countries, speaking 20 languages.
If you would like to join the team please fill in this form
If you already volunteer with us now or in the past and don't see yourself represented on the map, please get in contact and we'll add you right away!