A Little Free Library grows in Little Compton

In May, my sister Kathleen and I spent a weekend in Naperville, Illinois – just outside of Chicago – there to celebrate the 90th birthday of my Aunt Mary. Naperville, where my cousin Ellen makes her home, is a great walking town and a great reading town, and Ellen is both a great walker and a great reader, So we walked, talked books, dropped in the town’s wonderful indie bookstore, and, on one of our walks, passed what appeared to be a nice wooden birdhouse, only this birdhouse was stuffed with books rather than starlings and bird seed.

Ellen asked us whether we were familiar with the Little Free Library movement.

Well, no, we weren’t.

Little Free Library was founded in 2009 in Hudson, Wisconsin, when Todd Bol, in a tribute to his school teacher mother, built a model little red school house, filled it with books, and plunked it on a pole in his front yard with a sign that read FREE BOOKS. And a philosophy of take one, leave one.

The idea has really taken off, and today there are over 25,000 little free libraries, worldwide.

Although it was fun to see the Naperville’s LFL, I didn’t give it much thought.

It’s not as if I were going to go ahead and put one out front, where it would be just as likely to end up stuffed with banana peels, Starbucks cups (I was going to say Dunkin cups, but what’s on the corner is a Starbucks), and little plastic dog poop bags.

Then the other evening, I had dinner with two old high school friends. Missing was the fourth member of our band, my great and good friend Marie, who died last year just two months after my husband did.

Marie was a great reader, and one of the great pleasures of visiting her was coming away with a bag of books (and dumping a bag of books in her lap, while I was at it). We didn’t always agree. She liked Jonathan Franzen a lot more than I did, even going so far as standing in line to have him sign her copy of Freedom, a book that I despised.On the other hand, I really enjoyed Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, which she thought was dreadful. But mostly we liked the same writers, and much enjoyed introducing each other to new writers. (She gave me Lionel Shriver, I gave her Stewart O’Nan.)

Even a year after Marie’s death, I still find myself wondering what Marie would think about something I’m reading.

Anyway, while we were missing Marie at dinner, we had the pleasure of the company of Marie’s husband John.

We asked John, a recently retired (mostly) attorney, what he was doing with his time, and he mentioned that he was puttering around and taking care of some projects.

He whipped out his phone to show us his latest:

A Little Free Library just outside their second home in Little Compton, Rhode Island.

Hard to think of a better tribute to Marie…

I’ve become a quasi-convert to digital readers.

I still go to the library. I still buy physical books. I still trade them with my sisters, cousins and friends.

But I also do a fair amount of reading on my Kindle. (I say “my” Kindle, and it is mine. But it was pretty much my husband’s last consumer purchase. Since Jim read only dense tomes – physics, math, economics, philosophy of science – and read with a red Bic in hand so that he could make his notes in the margin, I have no idea what he was planning on doing with the Kindle. He bought it shortly before they found a tumor in his brain, which may explain him buying it. All he did was unpack it and hand it to me.)

But the downside of the Kindle – and it’s a big one – is that you can’t share it with anyone.

I like to trade, and I trade with my sisters, my cousins, and my friends. My sisters and I have actually talked about doing a device-swap and reading what the other guy has stored on hers. And you can’t put a digital book in a Little Free Library.

Love the idea. Love that there’s one in Little Compton, dedicated to Marie.