Day 1 at Schloss Blutenberg

After the long (but comfortable- I can recommend Qatar Airways) flight here, today has seemed rather surreal. I arrived at my accommodation by about 3pm yesterday (Sunday) after a very straightforward train ride and then short taxi drive from Munich Airport. It was a stunning and warm autumn day, and the place I am staying at is right beside a very fast flowing little river called the Wurm (with an umlaut over the ‘u’). There are lots of established autumn coloured trees and many people from the very young to the very old out on the bike path beside the river. My landlady is currently out of the country, but another of her tenants met me and gave me some lunch and dinner as no shops are open on a Sunday in this part of town.

I stayed awake as long as I could before falling into a heavy sleep around 8pm, and then woke at a not too indecent hour today. I got up quite early and popped into a local bakery and vege shop to stock up on some food, and then headed into Schloss Blutenberg (Blutenberg Castle) where the International Youth Library is situated. The castle is picturesque, and I stopped for a coffee at the little cafe on site before ‘going to work’.

I managed to get a bit confused about where to find Petra who is the Director of the library, but once we found each other I was warmly welcomed, and the operations of the IJB were explained to me. I got to meet an amazing group of people who specialise in obtaining books from different language sets for the library. I say ‘obtaining’ because somewhat surprisingly the library has no budget for this. While their people budget is contributed to by three levels of government (Federal, Bavarian, and Munich city) they rely on publishers being willing to send their latest releases to the library at no charge, and as you can imagine, maintaining such a set of relationships , and keeping abreast of children’s literature in a range of languages is no mean feat. I take my hat off to them.

The library also has programmes for schools to visit the library, maintains the White Raven Book List (see http://www.ijb.de/en/reference-library/white-ravens-online.html) and a biannual festival of White Raven authors and illustrators, curates regular exhibitions on the work of authors and illustrators, and has a lending library of books from about 30 different languages open to the public. In addition there is the research library where I am based. In it I am surrounded by books about children’s literature, including our very own Betty Gilderdale’s  A Sea Change which I saw as I was being taught how to use the catalogue.

The initiation process conducted by Petra at IJB was very warm, friendly and thorough. The stack of books I had ordered from the catalogue while I was in New Zealand were there waiting for me. They look so very interesting, and I had a quick rifle through them before heading home. My head is still rather foggy, but I look forward to looking at my books more closely and starting some analysis tomorrow.