The woman who read Auckland: Janet McAllister visits Albany and Glenfield libraries

Albany's tiny, beautiful 1922 Memorial Library. Picture / Luke Harvey

Albany "village": once home to free-range bantams, now full of snarling traffic-wearing number plates like HEALA and MEAT4U.

Car mania has left Albany's tiny, beautiful 1922 Memorial Library "somewhat marooned on a large traffic island", as historian David Verran puts it. But its just-restored arts-and-crafts stained glass still gleams with symbols of power, justice and healing: the sword, the scales and the snake-entwined Rod of Asclepius.

In contrast, the slightly less-tiny Albany Village Library is the most nondescript library in the world. Opened in 2004, it sits underneath what looks like an apartment block and is so boring I missed it sitting in plain view and trotted off in the wrong direction through Kell Park, where I found no libraries or chickens.

It turns out the library and the hens were hanging out together or, at least, the rustic library decor is nostalgic of a real village. Library chicken ceramics overlook butter churns, left over from Heritage Week (butter is a "concentrated form of fluid milk"; the F-word rhyming with "pat" isn't mentioned); fabulous glass walls overlook the Kell firs.
More poultry: Chicken Little features at bilingual Russian Storytime. "The sly fox ate them all ... Did you like the story?" librarian Lana Gaevski asks a small handful of kids in floral knits.

"What is the moral of the story? It is that you have to verify your facts!"

An excellent point for all voters.

The places of origin of Gaevski's regular attendees evoke serious post-war history: Israel, Belarus and Kazakhstan as well as Russia; often Chinese-speaking parents also know a little Russian. (Disappointingly, there's no library connection to the nearby Armenian-Russian deli delightfully named "Uncle Delicious", which uses Noah's Ark to sell dried meats online.)

Also on the unfashionable side of the motorway is Glenfield, whose Wikipedia list of notable people extends to one Rachel Hunter. The end. The forgotten suburb got a library in 1975 only after it (and Albany) controversially left westie, north-neglecting Waitemata County for Takapuna City.

Glenfield Library lords it over Albany's by seeming to inhabit not one but two boring buildings. The Frankenstein schmoosh layout is like one-and-a-half butterfly wings; the torn wing is fabulously quiet: fiction shelves (two Poirots!) and a study nook-with-a-view.

The larger wing vibrates happily, full of small boys exclaiming at a screw-faced 3D printer and at their hero, a funky librarian who knows how the thing works.

The room's attractive: Glenfield Men's Shed men restored the Thomas train; Glenfield Intermediate students painted the flowers and fish above the real flowers and fish. Also of note: Auckland's second-largest Arabic collection.

The lovely librarians are clearly overworked today; the librarian monopolised by the young fry is also needed behind the scenes. "You'll be the only kid in tomorrow's [library] Minecraft class with a 3D-printed sword," he tells the most excited boy. "How do you know?" counters the kid. He clearly agrees Chicken Little was a doofus, who should have verified her facts.