The Little Free Library: A How-To & an Encomium

Free Books!!

Before writing this short post, I read up on the origins of the Little Free Library and learned these neighborhood take-a-book, share-a-book boxes (aka bookhouses), some of them very colorful and capacious, now number more than 150,000 worldwide and can be found in 115 countries.

In 2009, the first LFL bookhouse was built and stocked by Todd Bol, a resident of Hudson, Wisconsin, in honor of his recently deceased mother who was an ardent book lover. Hudson is a town of about 15,000 people on the far western border of the state, close to the Twin Cities. Bol ran the nonprofit from there until his death in October 2018. The Little Free Library organization is now based in St. Paul.

(An LFL on Oakdale Street in Pasadena, CA)

At least a dozen LFLs hang out in front yards and on street corners within a short walk from my home in Pasadena. When my partner and I moved to a new place last November (not far from our old domicile - same zip code), I went through our bookshelves and sifted out duplicate copies and many old issues of literary magazines, packing them into canvas bags and hauling them to some of the free libraries closest to us. (If anyone needs a back issue of New Ohio Review or Fifth Wednesday Journal, you can head over to the bookhouse just south of Walnut on Meridith Street - I have a feeling they haven’t all been claimed yet.)

(The Pierre Berton bio in this LFL on Las Lunas Street is a book I also donated in early November – it’s now late March…poor Pierre!)

If you’d like to install a Little Free Library in your neighborhood, you can build your own bookhouse and register it with LFL or order a pre-made one sold on their website. They also sell community dog treat boxes and small benches to attach to the bookhouse column.

Here is one of the LFL books I picked up in the last year – written while Eleanor Coppola was in the Philippines in the mid-’70s with Francis Ford Coppola and their children while Apocalypse Now was in production.

Two more neighborhood LFLs:

(On Hamilton Street near Orange Grove Boulevard)

(On the corner of Holliston and Mountain Street)