UNDER CREAKING FANS and stacked in grey metal cabinets, piled under dust sheets in crowded corridors, or left higgledy-piggledy in corners - here is found the national book collection of Laos.
It's a tale that's part tragedy and part romance, moving ever closer towards a happy ending, with a plot line marred by natural and political disasters, but galvanised by surprising individuals, some of them heroines.
Behind the elegant facade of a restored French colonial-era mansion in Vientiane, there's no doubt about the desire for books or their meaning in a nation's literary culture. This library - set up in 1956 - is also home to path-breaking projects to preserve and recharge both the written and the musical culture of Laos.
'I've been with the library since 1975 and have been working very hard, running after foreign funds and many projects,' says library director Kongdeuane Nettavong. Raising the local skills level is crucial - out of 46 staff just 18 are professionals - and the simple idea of promoting the written word still has a long way to go before it gains lasting support.
It's appropriate that Nettavong's library is also the centre of a national project to first find, then preserve, a key aspect of Laotian culture which is in danger of literally falling apart: the vast but rotting collections of temple manuscripts scattered across the country.
In an upstairs room at Vientiane's national library, a woman pores over a collection of what looks like leaves or bark with strange squiggles on them. These precious manuscripts in either Lao or the Buddhist Pali script, are inscribed on palm leaf or the less durable mulberry tree paper.
