69/100: Shout Out to Little Free Libraries
This vignette is one in a series of 100 about the libraries of New York City.
I was going to the Brooklyn Heights Library today when I passed one of those Free Little Libraries on St. Marks Street. You know these things, the usually wooden miniature structures that look halfway between a birdhouse and a kid’s puppet show stand. Each one is fitted with a pint-size door that opens to showcase a cutesy collection of community books.
It’s a simple system: take a book and leave another in its place. Truthfully, I don’t think I’ve ever actually used one of these — I’m trying to remember when Little Free Libraries became a thing; in a way they feel like the kind of entity that’s always been here, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t the case.
I did a little research; it’s a trademarked non-profit dating back to 2009. Appropriately, it’s got a cute origin story:
A woodworker living in Wisconsin named Todd Bol built a model of a one-room school house and filled it with books. The structure was a tribute to his mother, a teacher who loved to read. He put it in his front yard and soon friends and family members were asking him to make more for their own communities. Within a year, these book houses had caught the attention of eventual LFL co-founder Rick Brooks, who together with Bol saw the potential that these little houses had for fostering both reading and community.
(Fun side fact: in 2011, Bol and Brooks set themselves a goal inspired by philanthropist / Robber Baron Andrew Carnegie, who around 1900 pledged to fund the construction of 2,509 public libraries around the world. It took around 30 years to accomplish. In tribute, Bol and Brooks to match that number with their own Little Free Libraries by the end of 2013. They ended up accomplishing their goal in August 2012, the same year in which Little Free Library became a registered non-profit organization.)
By 2022, there were over 150,000 LFLs in more than 120 countries worldwide. It works because it’s a super simple concept that’s easy to implement, and people get genuine enjoyment from it.
For me, the Little Free Library is more of a gesture than a service. In terms of the actual books of offer, they leave a lot to be desired. If you’re lucky, there will be one bestseller — you’ve never heard of it but at least it sold ten thousand copies — and otherwise it’s discount self-help books and drug store thrillers.
There are, I should point out, some communities who invest more time and resources into their little libraries and resultingly have more curated collections than others — books geared towards kids or different language books, that kind of thing. I wonder if there’s an LFL in Brighton Beach and if it’s mostly Russian books. I’ll have to check next time I go.
St. Marks, in any case, does not appear to have been too picky in its curating process. In this book house:
The Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought
Poems and Rhymes no author
A leatherbound collection of Reader’s Digest Picks including Old Yeller and some other rather stale classics.
The Vegetarian Epicure
You’ve Got It Made by Marian Burros
Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zin
Innocent Blood by P.D. James
Share Your Smile: Ralna’s Guide to Telling Your Own Story by Ralna Telgemeler
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Ok fine so Handmaid’s Tale is a bestseller you probably have heard of, but otherwise I think these picks support my previous statement.
What is it then, that makes these precious pint-sized libraries so appealing?
Life moves so quickly now, and in an increasingly machine dominated culture. So much of our lives take place in these little vacuumed digiverses that only exist on our devices, away from real life and real people. In a way these Little Libraries are like evidence that humans are still among us, still thinking, still reading books.
People have complex relationships with books. We form attachments to them, feel the need to review them, discuss them, pass them on to friends and family — but always with the expectation of getting them back. If they’re any good, we feel wiser and more worldly for having read them; they impacted the way we think about things. When we share these kinds of books with people, we’re sharing ideas, and we’re sharing a bit of ourselves too.
I said earlier that LFLs have a quality to them that makes them feel as though they’ve always been around, even though this isn’t the case. They’re inherently nostalgic; a reminder of simpler times, a bygone era where people talked to each other and read books.
I’m resolving to bring a book from home tomorrow; make my own contribution to the FLL culture. I should take one too, but I’ve already read Handmaid’s Tale. I’ll see, maybe there will be something new tomorrow. In fact, this could be a fun side project or off-shoot. I already checked, there’s a map of all the FLLs in Brooklyn on the website, I could visit all of them and document the books and take pictures and write and… but I’ll just start by bringing something to the one near my house tomorrow.
Thanks for reading!
