It all started with one man and one book. In 2003, following the death of a close friend, Sarah Garnett decided she wanted to help the disadvantaged. It was while giving out food with the Just Enough Faith vans in the centre of Sydney that she first noticed a man reading a book he had fished out of a garbage bin.

The following week she brought him a book of her own from home.  Before too long, she was collecting books from friends and family to give out on the footpath to those men and women who wanted to feed their minds as well as their bodies.  

Today, that first man, Joe, is still among dozens of people who come every Tuesday night to the Benjamin Andrew Footpath Library. These days, however, he is just the tip of the literary iceberg. Across Sydney, the Footpath Library gives away around a thousand books every week to homeless people living on the streets and in hostels.  

Sarah shakes her head and smiles as she explains how the project has blossomed beyond her wildest expectations.

“I say to Joe all the time ‘Look at what you’ve done!’ And he laughs his head off. We now have 18 hostel libraries, with another eight about to open, and Footpath Libraries here and in Melbourne. The aim is to go national and have libraries in hostels in every capital city in Australia in the next two years.”

While she confesses that there have been times when it has felt overwhelming, Sarah says she’s been fortunate enough to have sponsors provide storage areas and deliver the boxes of books around Sydney each week.

Then there are the volunteers, including the library’s Publishers Manager Paula Grunseit, who works with publishers to source appropriate books for the various hostels, such as self help parenting books and children’s books to women’s hostels.

As a former librarian, in the past Paula has felt like she was struggling to encourage people to read, making it all the more inspiring to help people at the Footpath Library. “Before I’ve even taken the books out of the car you can see them coming, ‘The books are here!’ They’re so keen to read.”

Around half of the books that are sent out are new, while the other half are second hand and donated by members of the public. There are some books that Sarah is not prepared to take, including wine guides, get rich quick manuals and books about suicide or depression. She also asks people to only donate books that they would be happy to have on their own bookshelves.

“I think there’s a bit of a mentality of ‘they should be happy to get anything’, but I won’t take books that are damaged or really old. These people have pride as well and I want to give them a book that they’ll be happy to hold.”

As about a dozen men go carefully over the books that have been unpacked from the back of Sarah’s car and spread over the footpath, I’m introduced to Peter, who Sarah describes as one of her best customers.

Peter has been coming to the Footpath Library for the past year and confesses that the kitchen cupboards in his unit are filled with books rather than saucepans. As Lindy Jones from Abbey’s Bookshop arrives and starts unloading her box of books onto the street, Peter moves forward and snaps up three items including the Britannica Guide to 100 Most Influential Scientists.

Lindy says it has been a revelation to see which books are the most popular.

“Its amazing - I get a lot of classics including the ancient Roman and Greek writers and they’re the ones that don’t last.  I don’t ask their history but you just know that some of them are very well educated people. After all, if you don’t know who Pliny is, why would you read him?

“That was the eye opener for me. I guess you have preconceptions, you think maybe it’s their fault, or maybe they didn’t get an education. It’s sad in a way to see it’s just a misstep. Somehow something went wrong for these people.”

At the other end of the spectrum, Sarah says there are those who come to the library who are illiterate and like to borrow magazines to look at the pictures, while others can read, but have chosen not to. Such as Steve, a man who came to the Footpath Library when he first got out of a nine year stint in jail.

“When I asked him what he liked to read he said he’d never read a book. I told him to have a look just in case he found something he liked, and he picked up this book and started to laugh. It was Don’t tell mum I work on the oilrigs she thinks I’m a piano player in a brothel by Paul Carter. He came back the next week and told me it was the first book he had ever read cover to cover. Since then I’ve had probably four or five people come up and say they’ve read their first book. And that’s what I’m doing it for.”

As well as expanding the library in hostels around the country, Sarah continues to dream up ways she’d like to help her clientele. Such as finding a chain of optometrists that would be prepared to donate used reading glasses that are exchanged for new ones.  

“Ideally the glasses should be prescription, but they don’t have to be. A lot of these people haven’t had their eyes checked in years, or they’re reading with glasses that are being held together with sticky tape. I’d hate to think I was contributing to their eye problems by giving them books to read.

“I’d also love eco-friendly library bags. It would be great to be able to give them one every now and again, to make them feel special. And we also need bookshelves. After all, we can’t put a library into the hostels unless we’ve got the bookshelves. At the moment we buy them with donations and put a plaque on each shelf with the donor’s name, but it would be a great help to have a business sponsor the bookshelves.”  

As she looks to the future, Sarah says the most important thing is that everyone is given the opportunity to read. And she is going to do everything she can to make it so.

“These are people out there who save 20 cents at a time to buy books, which is ridiculous. These people have a lot of time on their hands and would love to use a real library, but they can’t join because they don’t have any ID. Half of them don’t even have an official identity. They don’t want to tell you who they are, and that’s fine with me. I don’t need to know your name. All I want to know is what you would like to read.”

To find out more information on how to donate books or sponsor a bookshelf in a hostel go to www.footpathlibrary.org