“In Iraq, and in the Arab world as a whole, public libraries are extremely under-funded and cannot even remotely satisfy the needs of those who want to read. People like me, who had to walk long distances to visit a public library only to be asked to pay huge fees which I could never afford, had no choice but to turn to the libraries of our mosques, which were even poorer than the public ones. The network of bookshops in Iraq is denser than in many other Arab countries. People know about the Iraqis’ eagerness to read. During the 1980s, Iraqi booksellers still ordered several times the volume of what their Egyptian colleagues ordered. And despite the embargo and the weak purchasing power of the past years, every new publication sold like hotcakes.”