Hodgepodge 193/365 - Little Free Libraries

First Little Free Library, Hudson, WI, 2009

I'm considering installing a Little Free Library in front of our house. A few reasons:

(1) We live on a street that has quite a bit of foot traffic: folks walking their dogs, most of whom I know by name (the dogs, that is—and some of the people); grandparents out with their grandkids on bikes; people talking a brisk stroll to and through the small city park at the end of our street and continuing on to the Frog Pond Wetland Preserve across the two-lane highway leading to Salinas.

Surely some of those pedestrians would enjoy having a Little Free Library to stop at and sample the fare of.

(2) I have way too many books. I could stock the Little Free Library single-handed! For years! All sorts of genres, including kids' books (if I can bear to give them up, which . . . maybe not).

Even though "Take a Book, Leave a Book" is the motto of the group, mine would be a Take Anything You Like! No Need to Leave Anything Behind! sort of Little Free Library.

(3) I like the idea of building the structure from scratch and then personalizing it through cool decoration.

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Our house is set about twenty feet up from the street, so I'm not worried about having people loitering in front as they scan my Little Free Library offerings. So I've been researching the issue. I've found some great examples of creative Little Free Libraries, such as:

In Ireland

Dr. Who's Tardis

In Dunedin, New Zealand

I've also found a website with detailed instructions for making a nice roomy one.

Or one can buy them from the Little Free Libraries website, at a cost ranging from $139 for an unfinished small-library kit, to $325 for a fully painted and finished two-story library, to $2,500 for a Peace Pole, with messages of peace in 80 languages. I'd love to build one of my own, but I might go lazy and get a Modern Two Story for only $300:

We'll see. I'm not going to be moving too quickly on this idea—I've got plenty of other projects to distract me for the foreseeable future. But it's niggling at my noggin. I think it could be fun and a good addition to the neighborhood. And it could help me (slowly) clean off some of my bookshelves.