Charlie Alison

“Not long after my wife and I got married, she presented me with my first project. A friend of hers had posted a Facebook note about a project up in Wisconsin called Little Free Library. Alison loved the idea. She reads far more widely than me and loves libraries. She works at the Fayetteville Public Library now and wanted us to put up a Little Free Library in our yard. She checked the national website and realized there wasn’t an LFL in Arkansas yet, so she made me swear secrecy while I built a little library so that ours would be the first one in the state. So there I am sawing up wood on the front porch and building this box, and the neighbors stop and ask what I’m building. I tell them I can’t tell them. They then start guessing. Barbara, who lives next door, asked hopefully whether it was a trap for groundhogs, which were plaguing the backyard vegetable gardens at the time. I said no. Another asked if it was a recycling bin. No. It went that way for a week. Finally, Alison, our son Luke and I erected it next to the sidewalk with a little concrete step for children to sit on, and christened it with champagne that flowed in its gutters. Todd Bol, the executive director of the national Little Free Library organization, came to Fayetteville and visited. It has copper gutters and downspouts and a miniature weather vane and remains stocked pretty much on its own, although Alison sometimes adds children’s books because we have lots of kids in the surrounding neighborhoods. Our LFL is No. 227, and there are more than 50,000 registered Little Free Libraries around the world today.”