The Surprising Vitality of Little Free Library
Asynchronous book trading is fast.
Starting in June of this year, we’ve been placing copies of our books into Little Free Libraries. We documented that process of creating sets of books for placement here on Substack at the time.
Over the summer we followed up on the placements, checking in days later to see if the books were still there. To our surprise, our books were gone and so were the other ones we remember being there when we placed them. The turnover was wild.
According to the Little Free Library website, there are more than 150,000 registered book-sharing boxes in 120 countries worldwide. The nonprofit behind the movement, which started in 2009, runs on ~$3M / year and is able to have an enormous impact, at least in some neighborhoods.
We also encountered lots of boxes that are not officially registered, like this four-door in Wheaton:
The open, chaotic nature of the boxes makes for another mass distibution method. Can’t control the future, forward.
We fixed this temporarily empty spot.
We saw spots where dozens of books completely turn over in the course of just a few weeks.
A person removes a book from from a rainbow-painted Little Free library while carrying a Joan Didion tote bag surrounded by Halloween decorations and Autumn leaves.
Places like Myopic Books, which purchases books on Fridays and Saturdays have a robust trade — the economy of book sellers is fascinating. Are any of these books are collected from Little Free Libraries?
Have you ever pulled a book from a little Free library. Have you ever left a book? How often do you look inside the locations? Are they a part of your life?