It began with one shelf, and a promise to bring it back.
Noholi started in 2016 as a lending shelf in a Pallabi living room — two hundred books, a notebook for signatures, and a rule that whatever you borrowed, you returned with a sentence about why it mattered.
Today it is a public library of twelve thousand volumes, a small press, a recording studio and a reading room that is full most afternoons. The notebook is still there. It has run to forty-one volumes.
To make reading in Bangla and English free to start, easy to continue and joyful to share.
A Bangladesh where every neighbourhood has a library that feels like it belongs to everyone in it.
What Noholi offers
- 01
A lending library
Twelve thousand printed books across fiction, non-fiction and children's shelves, in Bangla and English.
- 02
Noholi Prokash
A small press publishing debut novelists, poets and community anthologies.
- 03
A digital shelf
E-books readable in any browser and audio books recorded in our own studio.
- 04
A reading room
Forty seats, good light, strong tea and a strict-but-kind silence policy.
- 05
Write Ups
Blogs, creative writing and reviews by members, librarians and visiting writers.
- 06
A community
Story hours, reading circles and monsoon poetry evenings, open to everyone.
"A library is the only room in the city where nobody asks you to buy anything."
We believe reading is a shared act. A book read by forty people is not worn out — it is finished.
বই পড়া মানে একা থাকা নয় — অন্যদের সঙ্গে একই নীরবতায় বসে থাকা।
Our members range from six-year-olds at Friday story hour to retired professors working through the complete Elias. Around a third read mostly in English, a third mostly in Bangla, and a third refuse to choose.
Membership is free, and always will be. Donations, Noholi Books and volunteers fund new acquisitions and the children's corner.
Come and read with us.
Membership is free. Bring your NID and you're in.