Free!
Like many cities, there are Little Free Libraries scattered around, and I regularly pass by them on walks. And they seem pretty well liked — you’ll often see people peering and poking around, sometimes taking photos.
But the incredibly low key nature of them — you want it, take it, you don’t, who cares? — is not immune to the Hawt Taek industry. After plenty of little pieces commenting on them in a fairly neutral way, the NY Times had to run a dumb piece late last year entitled “Is My Little Library Contributing to the Gentrification of my Black Neighborhood.” The author, of course, comes to some thumbsucking muddled conclusions in the solipsistic way you’d expect from a Times writer — she never freaking bothers to engage with anyone. It’s all a mess of projection and imagined symbolic interaction.
And then this spawned a minor backlash from the right wing media whining about imagined slights. And of course the editors at the Times knew exactly the cynical game they were playing when they ran the piece in the first place, and the cycle they’d be spawning. Whatever.
The Boxes Don’t Care
But nobody cared. The books keep going in and out. The function of Little Libraries is so basic that they resist the Hawt Taek industry just fine. So here are some examples.
This is, as far as I remember, the first one in my neighborhood. It has a new bit of metal flashing on the roof but otherwise has looked this way for years.
This one appeared at the playground near my house, unfortunately well after the days when my kids visited. It sure would have been nice to have it when I took them out of the house at 7 AM Saturdays and sat blankly on a park bench.
Another playground slightly farther away got this one.
Many take fairly utilitarian forms, like these:
Others take more atypical forms.
This one is lit up at night by solar powered lights:
And this one has a pretty impressive amount of woodworking detail, including a roof made of carefully fitted pieces glued in a sunrise pattern:
My little town in the hills has loads of these Little Free Libraries. When I drive there for supplies, I try to bring a few books. If people are going to put up these things, the least I can do is share some of the book bounty I have.
We have a ton of those little libraries & I appreciate them until I see the bible & other religious fiction that is put there with people with an evil agenda.
There’s one right across the street from me. It mostly has children’s books. I pick them up on sale when I can to contribute. We have a few of the small pantries too. One annoys me by calling itself a Blessings Box so I go out of my way to the other one.The ones I’ve seen here are all standard Little Free libraries. I like the more creative ones you have here.
We have many in our neighborhood and we love them. Two got converted into food pantries during the pandemic which is handy. Most of them look generic. Some match the house they are planted in front of. And you can tell that some were a real labour of love. The most iconic ones are a miniature red phone box (British phone booth) and a old fashioned school with its own tower and bell on top. I looked into getting an official one but they are expensive and generic looking and I’m not a carpenter who can whip one up. Which makes me appreciate them all the more.
We have quite a few here as well. My wife’s library branches all sponsor them, so they put donated books in them.
The unintended consequence is that there are a couple of places here you can sell used books for cash, so people will often go grab anything worthwhile and sell it. That’s in turn led to signs about “books not being for sale.”
I looked in one once at a park near here and found a tiny Lynk figurine still in the original package (from Legend of Zelda, for those of you who aren’t into video gaming). I took it home and gave it to my delighted daughter who has a vast Zelda collection. Turns out it’s worth about $30 or so to collectors. Now my daughter peers into every one, hoping lightning will strike again.
There’s one near my house for jigsaw puzzles.
We have several of these in my town as well, most have popped up in the last 5 years. I can only assume it’s people with way too much time on their hands, because we have an excellent free public library in the center of town.