The Little Free Library movement offers a great way to unload some of your old books and discover some ones that someone else has left for the taking. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Little Free Libraries”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Martha Barnette.
And I’m Grant Barrett.
You know, my house is one of those bookish houses, right?
Oh, what a surprise!
There are books everywhere.
You’ve come over for my son’s birthday and some other things.
My wife, my son, and I are all always reading something.
Yeah, it’s like those books are breeding in there or something.
And when you have three readers in the house, you go to the library a lot, right?
You get books at thrift stores, too, and you go to the used bookstores also.
And you go to the independent bookstores.
And sometimes you even go to the chains.
Or you like to support the little guys, right?
Right.
My favorite way to get books, though, is the book sale at the library.
They take their withdrawn books.
They take books that have been donated.
They sell them for a quarter or 50 cents.
I can come home with stacks of books, and I do, 12, 15, 20 books, more books than I can carry, multiple trips.
And it’s like $15, $11.
It’s always a tiny amount of money, and then the book goes back to the friends of the library organization, and they support the library in that way.
And I feel like I’m doing two good deeds, right?
Yeah.
On one hand, I’m getting books to read.
On the other hand, I’m supporting the library.
And you’re supporting bookshelf makers.
Well, that’s the problem.
I’ve begun to worry about all these books in my house.
They say that Southern California is due for an earthquake.
And my bookshelves are not anchored to the wall.
And they’re layers deep.
You know, we’re not talking about one row of books.
We’re talking about two or three.
And they’re crammed in horizontally.
And I haven’t got to the point where books are on the floor.
I at least have that bit of house pride.
But ultimately, the best solution that we found was the little free libraries.
You know about these.
Sure.
The little, the cute little libraries just there on the street, right?
Yeah.
And if people don’t know what the little free libraries are, let me tell you, they’re the wonderful, cute little, they look like mailboxes, except they look like little houses.
Some of them look like barns or they have glass fronts.
They look like china cabinets.
Sometimes they’re made of stone or house siding.
They’re adorable.
And they’re usually in somebody’s yard next to the sidewalk, next to the road.
And the whole point of it is that somebody puts their books out for you to take.
No charge, no cost.
Hopefully you will bring some of your own books.
Maybe it’s a little bit of the leave one, take one.
Or in my case, the take nothing, leave 400.
Because what we did over the past couple months, we have been to little free libraries throughout San Diego, and there are hundreds of them here.
And we’ve been shoving books into these to reduce the number of books that are in my house.
And I just love the idea that my books, the spy thrillers or the language texts that I have more than one copy of, or the thing that somebody gave me that wasn’t quite right for me, or the picture books that my son has outgrown.
I love the idea that these books now have a new life in somebody else’s house, in somebody else’s hands, in somebody else’s family.
In any case, my house is a little safer now.
A little slimmer.
A little slimmer.
I still haven’t anchored the bookshelves to the wall yet.
I will do that.
But I would like to point out their website for the Little Free Libraries is littlefreelibraries.org.
And you can go there and they have a map.
You can type in your address and it’ll show you all the Little Free Libraries near you.
Oh, I didn’t know that.
Yeah.
Oh, because I’ve seen some just driving along.
It sounds like you need to build one of your own, like a little—
I know, right?
Like McMansion library outside your house.
I was thinking I want to attach to the car.
So wherever I go, there’s a library.
Not quite a library mobile, a book mobile, but something like that.
That would be—
A trailer?
Maybe you could buy a van.
That’s ridiculous.
Yeah.
I need to get a semi, I think.
In any case, the website for Little Free Libraries is littlefreelibrary.org.
Type in your address, look up the map, find a little free library near you, leave a book, take a book, but provide your community with more reading matter.
