The tradition of sipping coffee while reading and contemplating the works of those who have written volumes containing the wisdom of the ages has been brought to the National Library in the heart of the city of Port-of-Spain by the addition of a coffee shop. The Rituals chain has already spread to different parts of the city and the country, and is also venturing throughout the Caribbean, making it a successful commercial undertaking. The coffee-shop chain adds local variations to the international tradition of coffee-drinking, conversation and contemplation. As for this latest development, anyone who visits the US will know that when you enter a bookstore there, you are greeted by the scent of coffee from the in-house Starbucks; coffee shops and bookshops enjoy a natural symbiosis.
The location of a coffee shop in the major library in the country brings commerce together with culture. This marriage of two local leading brands marks a small but significant step. For one thing, it indicates a rereshingly progressive attitude on the part of the National Library Authority and Information?System Authority (Nalis), the entity that manages the National Library and all its branches around the country. In the course of its first decade, the National Library has flourished. It is more than a centre of the knowledge embodied in books. It has become host to a number of literary and cultural activities, including exhibitions, book launches, the showing of significant and culturally important films, and a venue for a variety of lectures which deal with the literary, social, economic and political condition of Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean. It has become the home of the flourishing Bocas Lit Fest, which utilises many spaces in the library, including the Old Fire Station, which once briefly housed the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, founded by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott.
For all these reasons and more, the National Library has become one of the very few places in downtown Port-of-Spain that people visit by choice-not necessarily to attend any of these events, or even to borrow books or do research. It is remarkably successful both as an institution and as a building. Its shady arcades are gathering and resting-places. It is grand yet welcoming, built to the right scale for a small tropical city, and bearing in mind its weather, its customs and its people. The library was designed by Colin Laird-the architect who can be said to have built modern Port-of-Spain-as a meeting place, not a museum. In his wisdom, part of his original vision for it was that the Old Fire Station should house a sidewalk cafe, where people could gather in the evenings after the bustle of the stores and offices had died down, or snatch a break in the shade during the day. The opening of a coffee shop in the main building is a variation on that theme that will work for the benefit of the library, its users and the city as a whole. This new venture, a combination of cultural activities with business, is a focus that a new Port-of-Spain has to take on, outside the purely material aspects of the life of the downtown district. It offers an oasis for human contact and contemplation, something that has long been evaporating from the city. It is also reasonable to expect that other kinds of productive companion activities will grow and attach themselves to drinking coffee, reading, contemplation and conversation in the National Library, and that the adults who indulge in these small pleasures will set an example to lead young people to gravitate to the joys and values of reading, learning and discussion.