The Stairwell Book Swap

How it started

When I moved to Graça I brought two suitcases, a cast-iron pan and, somehow, forty-three paperbacks. The flat had room for about eleven. So one Saturday I screwed a pine shelf to the wall of the second-floor landing, lined up the extras and taped up a note in my best Portuguese: Leve um, deixe um — take one, leave one.

For two weeks nothing happened. Then a battered copy of Os Maias appeared, followed by a stack of crime novels in German and a cookbook with someone’s shopping list still tucked inside.

Where it is now

The shelf has become three shelves and holds somewhere around three hundred books in four languages. There’s a children’s corner at knee height, a box of postcards people have left as bookmarks, and a notebook on a string where neighbours write what they thought of whatever they just finished. Some of the reviews are longer than the books.

Dona Fernanda appointed herself librarian within a month. She keeps the Portuguese titles in alphabetical order, quietly removes anything she considers unsuitable, and leaves notes for me when I’ve shelved something upside down. Her handwritten rules are taped to the wall. Rule four is simply: Devolva. Bring it back.

It’s also where I found half the books that taught me to read Portuguese — I wrote about that in Reading in two languages.

What it gave me

I came here knowing nobody. The shelf meant I had a reason to stop on the stairs and talk to people, even when my vocabulary ran out after “good morning” and “this one is very sad”. It turns out a book is an easy thing to hand a stranger.