On the first floor is a lending library with an ancient card catalogue in Dari and Pashtu. Once readers have made a selection and presented their card, the books miraculously appear through a small window in the wall.

On the second floor is the children’s library, which houses about 1,200 books and has small tables and chairs. Nabizada is proud of the children’s department, which was his initiative The third floor houses the reference and general reading texts collections. The reference collection includes encyclopedias from 1885 to 1976 in numerous languages, medical texts from 1950 and gifts from Kim Il Sung, Leonid Brezhnev and the American Library. The general reading texts collection holds books about ‘The Great Game’, archeological digs, history and art, in English, French, German, Persian and Russian. A stunning book of lithographs from 1839 sits dust-covered on a shelf.

An adjacent building houses 500 boxes of donated books in English. There is no space in the library to display them, neither do any of the staff speak English well enough to catalogue them. The boxes are stacked below the stairs and under office desks. There are plans but no funding to build or rent new premises. Typical of the titles donated are ‘Playing the Stock Market’ (1992) and ‘Fashion and Style for the Working Women’, both certain to be in great demand amongst Afghan readers. Nabizada needs someone to translate the titles so he can begin to catalogue them and then in the future allocate them to different libraries around the country. However, with the slowness of the donors and other priorities in a country where millions still rely on food aid, Nabizada does not foresee the building of new libraries in the near future, in fact he says he thinks it will take about 10 years. Numerous donations of books have arrived from abroad and the Afghans politely say ‘thank you’. Commenting on the 500 boxes of books donated to the Kabul Central Library, Tim Eyres of CfBT (Council for British Teachers) remarked that while the majority of the books were totally inappropriate or outdated, the Afghans don’t dare say no to such gifts. ‘A full tax rebate is often given for charity donations’ says Tim. ’Offloading these texts onto developing countries is unconscienable. If they are not useful in their home country, why would anyone think they would be useful to Afghans? It would be more valuable to put the tax dollars into 10 needed books than 20,000 books that will never be read.’ ‘This country has nothing to spare’ says Tim. ‘That donation was worse than useless’. The second building with the stored books is also used as an office, periodicals reading room and book repair workshop. At the time of writing there is great concern because it is understood that the overseas owner will be returning soon to take back this secondary office building, which was formerly his house.

During the Taliban era book covers bearing pictures of people (often the author) or animals were torn off. These books (in Dari and Pashtu) are now being laboriously repaired using scraps of paper, cardboard boxes for the covers, a pot of glue and heavy bricks to press them. Bags of books await the ministrations of the repair man. It seems that assistance in this area could dramatically increase the library’s usable collection. The Goethe-Institut has supplied money for desks and chairs and has brought in a librarian to assess needs, commence training to increase staff skills levels and offer support to care for their collection.

A request for funds to build an extension to the current building will ease the lack of space until new libraries can be built in Kabul. On a more prosaic note, the staff talk about electric heaters for the winter, vacuum cleaners and supplies for the repair of the Dari and Pashtu books that sit in bags in a small dark room.