BORDERLINE BOOKS
free books
free minds
The Kittiwake Trust
The Kittiwake Trust
Borderline Books was first set up in the Netherlands in 2001 and was the original project out of which The Kittiwake Trust grew. The reasons we didn't name the charity Borderline Books was so that we were not limited to a single project. The kittiwake was chosen as a symbol of our work as it is a bird without a home, coming to land only in order to nest, and when the fledglings are grown, they return to sea where they spend the rest of the year. Our projects tend to cater for those with no permanent home, those fleeing war, persecution or domestic abuse. Also those who hover on the borderline in one sense or another, people who are imprisoned and those who are on the fringes of society.
The Kittiwake Trust became a CIO on 26 January 2016 with charity number 1165318.
Our Patrons
Our Patrons
The patrons of Borderline Books are musician and activist Peggy Seeger and
writer and speaker Michael Rosen
Borderline Books remains an ever-growing project and one which we invite people to replicate all around the country. In addition we run a multilingual library in Newcastle upon Tyne. This grew out of a chance remark by a volunteer, that Borderline Books had more books in more languages than the universities in Newcastle have. From that moment we stopped giving those books away and began to work on building a library. The library currently contains in excess of 20,000 books in 102 languages.
STOP PRESS! The library, having just been awarded Library of Sanctuary status, is being made homeless.
We seek Sanctuary!
As far as we are aware, our library is almost unique in the UK. There is a Multilingual Library Scotland, a Multilingual Children's library as part of the Public Library in Sheffield and we know that Coventry is in the process of building a Multilingual Library there. We will be happy to support any and all of these projects in whatever way we can. We have already donated duplicate copies to both existing projects.
Professor David Crystal is patron of the Kittiwake Trust Multilingual |Library.
