From the always-ask-a-librarian-in-the-first-place category: When I ended my post about the charming Human Library a couple of weeks ago wondering if any readers knew more, I got a lot of nice responses — from librarians, of course.  Among them was a concise history of the concept from Gary D. Price, librarian and proprietor of a great blog for “information specialists,” INFOdocket.com.

Organizers at the first Human Library, held at Denmark's Roskilde Festival in 2000

Price says the human library movement began twelve years ago in Denmark when, according to a report from the Toronto Star,

After a young man was stabbed, a group of his friends formed an anti-violence youth group.

Hate breeds from a cold perch. If they could coax it down for a little warm face-time, it might shrivel, they figured. So, at the country’s biggest summer festival, they set up a space, filled it with 75 volunteers and offered them to festival-goers for conversations, or “reads.”

The slogan was “Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover.” One poster instructed: “Borrow a person you think you would not like. We have a wide selection of unpopular stereotypes. Everything from gays to hip hoppers to immigrants.”

The idea went viral. There are human libraries in more than 40 countries today, including Hungary, Brazil and China. The city of Lismore, Australia, has made it a monthly event.

Indeed, the idea — which also used the slogan “Stop the Violence” — went viral to Toronto (as Price notes in his email to me, “the busiest urban library system in the world”), where the public library took it up in 2010 to great success, according to this page on the library’s website. And in Australia, government funding has helped establish the first permanent Human Library, according to the website of the The Human Library Organisation. And it continues to spread, with Brazil, China, Columbia, Cyprus, Malaysia and South Africa among the most recent to join the 27 countries participating, and a claim to 30,000 members.

And the organizers are determined, it seems, to keep it spreading. One of the original founders, Ronni Abergel, continues to travel the world acting as a spokesman — here he is on a CBC radio interview just a couple of weeks ago. And here he is in an earlier School Library Journal interview from the U.S.

There seems to be no slowing down — an INFOdocket report from Christmas day notes that the first human library has opened in Beijing.