Botte and Ype set out to discover if Amsterdam's street bookshelves are truly terrible or secretly wonderful.
The episode is a replay of a spring 2021 recording where hosts Botte Jellema and Ype Driessen walk around Amsterdam to investigate public street bookshelves. They start near the zoo, commenting on the weather being both too cold and too hot. Their first bookshelf contains outdated professional books like 'Application Bookkeeping' from 1990 and a 'Microsoft PowerPoint' guide from 1994. They find a language course on cassette tapes and a book about truffles. Later, they encounter a bookshelf with corporate finance textbooks and 'Sex for Dummies'. They spontaneously interview a woman who works nearby; she reveals she cleans the bookshelf but people leave non-book items like pans, and books often get wet. Ype discusses his local activism to save a tree the zoo wants to remove for a new museum entrance, mentioning media coverage and a Facebook page. They compare it to the Amelisweerd forest protest in Utrecht. The hosts find another bookshelf with a copy of 'Summer of Fart' by Jabe Robben and a book by Erich von Däniken about ancient aliens, which Botte critiques as pseudoscience. They end by noting they didn't find any books by their co-host Paulien Cornelisse. The format is a casual, conversational walk with improvised observations and interactions.
