My new Little Free Library is open for business! I’ve wanted one of these charming things forever and I finally sprung for one. I got the least expensive preassembled one I could find. I painted it the same color as my house and did as much of the hardware as I could figure out. I put in a request for a village volunteer to help me plant (read: do it for me) the library in the ground.

In case you (cousins in England) don’t know what I’m talking about, Little Free Libraries are all over Seattle, practically one in every block. Tiny houses, larger than a birdhouse, smaller than a doll house, they offer books to a community of dog walkers.

Actually anyone can take a book and add a book.  Lots of people walk in Seattle. They walk their dogs, walk to the bus, walk to the store. My neighbor Gwen, who already wants to know how many books she is allowed to put in the Little Free Library, walks every morning just to walk. So do I. I’ve been walking in the cemetery behind my house because I love it in the morning mist with the falling leaves. Just to be clear, though, there aren’t any Little Free Libraries in the graveyard.

One of my reasons for wanting a Little Free Library is my book room.  A small room in the cabin behind my house has welcomed all the books that I years ago dragged up by the car load from my parents’ house in Olympia. When I purge the book collections in my house, I add to the book room. People used to give me books by the sacksful:

“Do you want these for your yard sale?”

“Oh sure, just think of me as the Crown Hill Good Will northern division.”

I had unloaded hundreds of books at my annual yard sale but I’ve retired from that career. The last sale was three years ago after which I took a deep breath and packed everything up while trying to not look at it or think about it. In three carloads, I took it to Good Will. But I could not bear to get rid of the books. After all there were some I hadn’t read. There were others I had read but might want to read again. They are books. Books, books, I love my books!

Book Room

One of the beauties of a yard sale is that people carry junk off your property.  Thinking in those terms resulted in a guy from Books for Prisoners collecting all the paperback mysteries. I still have shelves and shelves of fiction, history, biography, humor, poetry, essays, a 12 volume Groves music dictionary (anyone?), a set of Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization and a nearly complete set of Dickens from three summers ago when I read all the novels.

I enjoyed my summer of Dickens but none of the novels made the cut of books I want to re-read. Except maybe A Tale of Two Cities, which I’ve already read five times principally for the build-up to the scene at the end where Mme Defarge makes her murderous way through the streets for her final battle with Miss Pross.

But I digress. A delightful village volunteer, Jack, came over one Friday morning and dug the hole for the post, while I pulled what I call weeds and Tim (fellow gardener) calls ground cover in the winter garden. Jack set up a support to hold the post level. He mixed the cement and tamped it in. Then he came back a few hours later to affix the little library atop the post. I learned a lot, like I really need to get an electric screwdriver.

In progress

Vibrating with anticipation, I had already picked out the first books to go in the little library. I thought I’d be putting them in on Friday afternoon but Jack said to wait until Sunday. To appease my excitement, I put a sign in the little window saying “Books Coming Soon.” My maiden stack of books sat by the front door like Christmas presents waiting to be opened. Sunday morning I put them under my arm and marched out to the parking strip. I opened the door and to my great consternation found that someone had gotten there first. Someone had already donated two books. It took me all morning to stop feeling slightly cheated.

I understand that’s hardly in the spirit of the Little Free Library, whose registration plaques (I’ve ordered mine) say “Take a book. Share a book.”But do these people understand I have hundreds of books to get rid of? It’s been 24 hours and they are all still there!