Acquiring new books is always exciting for a librarian. When you decide to acquire books in a language you don't speak, then you are facing a great challenge: how to know which books are really relevant? And, the trickiest part: where to find them?
In Switzerland, we have the chance to be close to a lot of European countries and we have a lot of people coming from all over the world, which means that we have a plethora of book shop providing many languages: German, Italian, Spanish, Russian or even Arabic books are quite easy to find.
To offer a nice selection of books to our Japanese students, we tried to reach a book seller with whom we worked a few years ago. But to our dismay, the Genevan book shop who was selling books in Chinese, Korean and Japanese books closed a few years ago. We contacted all the manga book shops who told us that if we were searching for manga in Japanese, they could help us but not for Japanese novels: those were not in the same distribution circle.
That's when we had the idea to contact a small japanese shop in Lausanne called "Sur un air de Japon" (https://surunairdejapon.ch/). Not only did they accept to be our provider for japanese books but they researched for us which books were classics, which books were relevant for our target readers and which ones were still studied nowadays in Japan. We asked for twenty books and they gave us the brilliant selection you can now discover just bellow and at the entrance of our library:
If you want to read about Japan, don't hesitate to give a look to our most recent subscription: Niponica (https://web-japan.org/niponica/index_en.html), a magazine that introduces modern Japan to people all over the world.
What are you waiting for? We are waiting for you!
