Installing a Library on Your Front Lawn

For my birthday this year, only about five months late, I'm opening a library. This is not the brick Carnegie-type library with lots of shelves that you have in your neighborhood. My library is the size of a bread box and will stand on a pole in my front yard. It has a roof, three solid sides, and a glass front door so you can see the contents. It might hold 25 books. It's a free library, so if you see a book you'd like to read, you can just take it, and either right then, or some other day, or never, you can bring a book back in exchange.

I'm not one to join organized groups, Lord knows, but my library is a proud member of littlefreelibrary.org, which has helped to bring bread-box-sized libraries to many states in the Union as well as Canada, India, Italy, Germany, Ghana, and Australia. Today I received my official number in the mail: #2416.

You are perhaps wondering how I got this wacky idea. I blame it entirely on chickens. As a kid raised in San Francisco, I'm afraid I developed an unhealthy fixation on Laura Ingalls Wilder's “Little House” books, describing a life so different from my own. Since the age of eight I've wanted to raise chickens. This might be my most closely-held secret. Even though I live in the country now, and could easily acquire poultry, I haven't yet. I'm afraid chickens will attract predators, who will be foiled by the necessary chicken-protection equipment and eat my cats instead.

However, sometimes late at night I indulge in a mild form of what might be called homesteading porn: I go on-line and look at chicken coops. That's how I discovered a local coop builder was constructing these units for peoples' front yards. I'm not ready for chickens, but I can definitely raise books. I'm a writer, for Pete's sake! Giving books away is second nature.

I'm painting the library to match my house and I have seven volumes picked out to start the taking-and-leaving process. My main dilemma is where to locate this new member of the family. I live on a busy country road. I'd like to position the box in such a way that it slows people down but doesn't cause injury-accidents. There's room to pull off the pavement next to my mailbox, although as one friend pointed out, it's easier if, like the mail truck, you have right-handed drive. One of the stated aims of the Little Free Library organization is to build a sense of community. I don't think causing car accidents with your library is quite what they had in mind,.

Beginning in December, you can go over to littlefreelibrary.org and look me up on their US map. Swing by if you're in the neighborhood and don't have anything to read. Better yet, join the fun! Get someone to build you a one-room structure about the size of a bread box, nail it up on a pole, and put books in it yourself!