The Grand People's Study House
Elevator operator, Pyongyang, North Korea, February 2017.
This girl is an elevator operator in the Grand People's Study House – the central library in Pyongyang. This job dates back to a time when manual elevators were controlled by a large lever to regulate the elevator's speed. This required a sense of timing and a steady hand in order to always smoothly stop the elevator parallel to the floor. Today only very few places, decide to keep elevator operators. The Grand People's Study House in the DPRK is one of them. There I encountered the following conversation with one of our guides:
“How many books does this library have?”
“30 million”
“And how much did this library cost?”
“30 million US Dollars”
“I see…”
Only later I learned that it can fit up to 30 Million books while it currently only houses about ten thousand.
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
