A Library of One’s Own

Imagine a weatherproofed box of books outside a house where anyone is free to stop by and pick up a book, drop off a book, or just browse. It is such a charming idea, and seems so community-minded and friendly.

Here are some of the Little Free Libraries around Bethesda.

and here’s a very aspirational one in DC, modeled after this building, which says ‘Libraries and Justice for All’. One can only hope.

I didn’t think of having one of my own until last Christmas, when Alec and Denali gave me an LFL charter sign. Of course, one could install a bookbox without any sign, but the LFL charter lets you add it to the world map of LFLs, and who can resist that? I found an online plan that involved starting with a kitchen cabinet, and then became enamoured of the notion of building mine entirely out of donated or found materials. (That mostly worked out, but not entirely.)

What I bought, total ~$50:

• Used kitchen cabinet, 21″ x 13″ x 18″, from Habitat Restore
• Sheet of plywood from Home Depot for roof base and to cover the sides.
• small piece of Tyvek to protect the plywood roof.
• Solar light from Amazon
• 5′ post from Home Depot to mount the library

Found around the house or donated:

• piece of acrylic for a window in the door, plucked from someone’s trash
• pieces of wood for roof to create slanted roof
• half-round molding around door as a rain guard
• shingles for roof, leftover from our shed roof
• leftover Ikea cabinet shelf used as base for the library
• kitchen cabinet door knob
• TONS of paint, donated by neighbourhood
• lots of wood screws of various sizes, leftover from various house projects
• plumber’s caulk

It took 3 months, partly because I have very little woodworking or engineering experience, and partly because I was working on it intermittently, after my day job ended and when I had free chunks of time. Each step required much pondering, and of course there were a few missteps, luckily fixable. And many coats of paint.

On Mother’s Day, Denali and Alec came by, seemed a little surprised to see the library finally finished, but leapt enthusiastically into the installation process. A post was bought, the hole was dug, the braces attached to the post, the base screwed to the library … then finally, the library screwed onto the post.

I had been saving books for months, and Lisa had donated some too, so we had plenty to prime the library. I think all of us were expecting, perhaps, the occasional passer-by, maybe one or two a week. But the very next morning we had our first visitors!

who took all the baby board books 🙂

The LFL has been surprisingly busy, with at least one visitor a day. Here are some of the books that have been deposited.

• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith
• Leopard at the Door, by Jennifer McVeigh
• Lemony Snicket
• In the eye of the Sun, by Ahdaf Souief
• Math workbook for ages 8-10
• Civil War Battles and Armies
• I could pee on this, and other poems by cats
• Kids Cooking
• Wicked, by Gregory McGuire
• The Astronaut Wives Club, by Lily Koppel
• The Reader, by Bernard Schlink
• The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy
• Spring Moon, by Bette Bao Lord
• The Magnificat
• Faith, Trust and Belief: A Trilogy of the Spirit

The children’s books are the most popular, also a surprise. Kids, it seems, love the idea of an LFL and drag their parents by each day or two, to see what new books have turned up or to drop some off. The kids’ books change on a daily basis, while an adult book appears or disappears 2-3 times a week. I’m sad to say that the children around here seem more into books than the kids in Bangalore. It was quite different when I was growing up in India — some kids were artistic, some athletic, but ‘reading’ used to be the default hobby for everyone.

More fiction comes in than nonfiction, but the good nonfiction vanishes almost instantly. My copy of Catch and Kill was gone the same day.

Books vanish for a couple of weeks and then come back! I hadn’t expected this. Where the Crawdad Sings is out for the second time. Alas, no one seems interested in Maeve Binchy, which I had thought was good comfort reading and would be picked up quickly.

I find that I am borrowing books from my own library, too. I re-read some old favourites that turned up: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the NightTime. Both were still good the second time around. I’ve pulled Leopard at the Door and the Ahdaf Souief out until I read them.

Will the traffic increase or decrease in winter? On the one hand, fewer people are out and about, but on the other hand, people spend more time indoors and might want to read more books?

So far it’s been weatherproof, but I fully expect that it will need work by the winter. Will it survive a major storm? Not sure … I might just put a large trash bag over it if really bad weather is on the horizon.

Anyone who reads this is welcome to come by and browse! Even (especially) on sleepless nights.