Big idea of ‘Little Free Library’
I’m a sucker for a Little Free Library. It is, to me, an almost perfect expression of literary democracy: Take a book, return a book, reading not as commodity exchange but exchange of identity, of ideas.
Not long ago, I visited one in Echo Park, which revealed itself as a kind of mirror to its community — a few books about parenthood, C.S. Lewis’ “Narnia” series, “The Woman Warrior” by Maxine Hong Kingston. To look at those titles was like standing in some collective living room, perusing the books on the shelves for clues.
This is one of the things books offer us, a way into each other’s lives, each other’s passions.
As it happens, such libraries are the subject of Margret Aldrich’s “The Little Free Library Book” (Coffee House: 260 pp., $25), a surprisingly nutritious account. I say surprisingly because this is a gift book, written with the cooperation of Todd Bol, the Wisconsin man who brought the Little Free Library phenomenon into being in 2009. The original plan was to develop 2,510 of them — or one more than the 2,509 public libraries supported by Andrew Carnegie; six years later, there are more than 25,000 Little Free Libraries worldwide.
All of that is in “The Little Free Library Book,” which is both primer and inspiration, a history and a guide for how to get involved. “There are more than eleven thousand small towns across the United States that don’t have a public library,” Bol writes in a brief preface — which tells us just how necessary these grassroots manifestations of literacy truly are.
One of the finest aspects of the book are the profiles of library creators, such as the Porter family of Rancho Palos Verdes or Carolyn Bancroft of Bogota, Colombia. “A Chinese proverb says that a book is like a garden carried in the pocket,” Aldrich writes of Meleah Maynard and Melanie Peterson Nafziger of the Twin Cities, both of whom have integrated actual gardens into the design of their libraries.
This is the other thing about the libraries — that they are expressions of creativity in their own right. The library I visited in Echo Park had signage in both Spanish and English; among those photographed for the book is one that occupies an old sidewalk newspaper box and another designed to resemble a movie theatre marquee.
In the end, though, it’s really the books that are the draw, with their sense of reading as a shared source of interaction, as a conversation that exists not only writer-to-reader but reader-to-reader as well.