深圳书城

This guide to Shenzhen Book City traces how a fishing village turned Special Economic Zone in 1980 became a city of migrants with no shared history, where books became a kind of currency. It follows how that hunger for reading turned Shenzhen into a UNESCO Model City for Universal Reading in 2013, and how it shaped this branch itself -- opened in 2006 with forty-two thousand square meters of shelves, gardens, and skylights. On Sunday mornings, children between four and eight take a small stage in this building to compete in storytelling.