Binge Reading

Most people don’t hit up the local pub for some quiet reading. But in Hungary, a cold beer mixed with a good book is creating a whole new type of buzz.

Gyopar is a small pub just outside of Budapest where customers can satisfy both the party animal and the intellectual within. Three years ago manager Peter Maurer came up with the idea to create a public library inside his pub. Maurer, a former librarian says they had a lot of unused books and decided not to let them go to waste. So after a friend provided the shelves, the library was up and running with about 1,000 titles ranging from biographies to sports encyclopedias. And no library card necessary, customers just replace whatever they borrow with a book of their own.

Ferenc Nagy is a regular at the pub. He will often come in, grab a book and a beer and spend a couple hours reading. Nagy donated about 30 of his own books to the collection and says when the library opened people were worried it would take business from the village library. And it has, there’s nothing like a little binge reading to get you through a tough week.