The Tyre repair shop library called ‘Borrachalioteca’ in portuguese, is a community library based in Caieiras neighborhood in Sabará/Minas Gerais, Brazil. Created in 2002 by Marcos Túlio Damascena this project came from the interest in daily reading by his father’s shop clients which led to an installation of a bookcase filled with some book materials. This initiative received the Viva Leitura Prize in 2007 from Ministry of Culture, Education and Iberoamerican States Organization for Education Science. Besides that the project also integrates the national network of community libraries.

Tulio Dasmaceno (creator) and his father

The collection and service are distributed in three units: Son Salvador room in Cabral neighborhood (2008); House of Arts in Central neighborhood which gives place to Cordelteca Olegário Alfredo (2010) and Release Space for Reading in Sabará Prison (2010).

Among the activities and services offered to community are the loan books, internet computer access, cultural workshops, artistic performances, exhibition Cordel, reading mediation, storytelling and other reading promotion projects as Light Collection distribution (a book which periodically publishes literary works distributed for free) and Bread and Poetry participation project which disseminates poetic texts in bread packages specially made for the occasion.

The Tyre repair shop library  was the first community library in national territory to coordinate a Literary Party. It also brought city seminars, cultural attractions, authors, illustrators, storytellers and work shoppers presence that made the whole city breathe literature. Around five thousand books were distributed for free in the two editions of the event. As the city doesn’t have any bookstore a library was set up in an open space to give the students of the state the opportunity of exchange worth books for new books and also the chance to talk in person to authors and illustrators.

The Tyre repair shop library, with its different way of interpreting the world, opens doors to literary development by promoting book access as a human inalienable and unrestricted right.