Heroic Effort to Save Books in Iraq Subject of New Kids' Book

Author/illustrator Jeanette Winter creates award-winning children's books on some very complicated subjects: She has explored other cultures, from Mali to Mexico, and has introduced the lives of artists as varied as Georgia O' Keeffe and Emily Dickinson to young readers. Her latest book, The Librarian of Basra: A True Story From Iraq, to be published by Harcourt in January 2005, tells a small but significant story from the current war, in language that even the very young can comprehend.

As with many of her books, Winter drew her inspiration for The Librarian of Basra from a newspaper article, this one describing the actual 'librarian of Basra,' Alia Muhammad Baker. The story, which appeared in the New York Times in July 2003, described Baker's undertaking to save as many books as possible from the city's Central Library, where she had been chief librarian for 14 years. Once war seemed inevitable, Baker petitioned Basra's governor for permission to relocate the books to a safe haven, but he refused. His refusal forced Baker to pursue less conventional methods to rescue the precious books: She created an underground railroad, of sorts, for the 30,000 volumes, which included manuscripts hundreds of years old, a biography of Muhammad from about 1300 BC, and a Spanish-language Koran.

Winter includes a quote from Baker, which appeared in the Times article, on her book's dedication page: "In the Koran, the first thing God said to Muhammed was 'Read.'"

In an interview with BTW, Winter explained how the story of this dedicated librarian immediately struck her as a children's book because of "the sense of optimism it demonstrated." She knew it was a story that she could simplify to make it available to children "and help them understand something about war, in an oblique way.

"All of the facts that were needed [for the book] were there in the article; the problem was with the illustrations. I called the author [of the Times article], Shaila Dewan, and she put me in touch with the photographer [Richard Perry] who took the pictures for the story. He didn't have any others, and the library building burned down nine days after British forces stormed Basra in April. I searched the picture collections at the New York Public Library -- a great resource," Winter said about her quest for source materials for the books' illustrations. "Ninety percent of the Iraq file is of war, this one and the last one. I went to an exhibit of photographs of war correspondents and to an extraordinary showing of wartime art by children spanning the Spanish Civil War to the present, which has been made into a book [They Still Draw Pictures: Children's Art in Wartime From the Spanish Civil War to Kosovo by Anthony L. Geist, University of Illinois Press]."

The final page of The Librarian of Basra depicts a determined Baker surrounded by some of the 30,000 books she was able to save before the library's demise. Most of the fugitive books are stored in her home and the homes of friends, "safe with the librarian of Basra," until peace finally comes. Winter told BTW that Baker has not been able to see a copy of the book, and she became very ill after her heroic venture to safeguard about 70 percent of the library's collection. Her health has improved, according to Winter, and Baker has every intention of rebuilding the library before retiring. She will receive help in that effort from Harcourt, which will donate a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the book to a special fund administered by the American Library Association. --Nomi Schwartz