For the Love of Paper: Little Free Libraries
Last weekend, Little Free Library celebrated its tenth anniversary. LFL marked the occasion with The Big Share, encouraging book lovers to share books in libraries near them. Sugar and I dropped a few books in libraries in our neighborhood, and the hardest part was, of course, letting go of a few in the collection.
Everyone else called her Mammy, and I inexplicably called her Scat. I love how her sweet great-grandmother hands are delicately wrapped around this book. I also love that a giant tin of butter cookies sits behind us; butter cookies and neapolitan ice cream (“pink, white, and brown” to me) were always on offer in her home.
I was a bookworm from the start. As a toddler, I would marvel watching the faces of my mother, grandmother, or pictured at left, great-grandmother, read aloud; it seemed pure magic that they could turn gibberish on a page into stories from their mouths. After my mom taught me to read, reading alongside a grown-up was one of my favorite things. (Need I even mention that I was an only child? Seems so obvious now, doesn’t it?)
My grandmother Gagie - that was my baby talk mash-up of “Granny” and “Peggy” - sent me two books for my first day of kindergarten. Monroe’s New First Reader isn’t dated; its accompanying volume, Robinson’s First Book in Arithmetic, was published in 1874. Her inscription: “Here’s hoping you love to read as much as I do.” Her wish came true, and I inherited her love of antiques to boot.
I anxiously awaited each month’s new release in The Baby-sitter’s Club collection as an elementary schooler. I’d drag my mom into Waldenbooks in the mall and convince her that I absolutely needed the latest one. At girl scout camp one summer, my tent mate told me that her parents paid her to read, a penny a page. I brought that idea back to my parents, and they laughed at me.
The books my grandmother gave me on my first day of kindergarten are in a shadowbox in my office.
Something happened around middle school. The teasing over my bookwormishness got old, and the pubescent self-consciousness of being different pushed the books away for a while. A few popular novels found their way to me through my high school and early college years. John Grisham was really a thing at the time, and reading his books usually gave you something to talk about with people you didn’t know well, which my introverted nature always made a struggle.
As I moved into a business major and the English classes fell from my course schedule, I started to miss books. I was eager to read them for pleasure again, not for dissection in a class discussion. And so I eased back into being a bookworm. I did most of my studying in a bookstore. My college girlfriends and I exchanged novels for the train rides across Europe the summer after we graduated. Long distance book clubs became a way to stay in touch.
Country Bookshelf is the best bookstore in the whole world. The booksellers embody the love of sharing books, including frequent and sincere acts of giving back in our community.
Thanks to a blossomed book-loving identity and a pinch-hitting gig at my friend’s bookstore, Country Bookshelf, I have stacks of books. Some I’ve read; most I haven’t - this happens when you pass along the good ones. Scrounging up a few for The Big Share proved challenging.
A half-hour staring at the shelves yielded a half-dozen to give away. LFL has a directory on their website, from which I created my route. Sugar and I walked around town, seeking streets we hadn’t been down before. On our path to my friend Jessica’s LFL, I stumbled upon two more. I felt sneaky walking into other’s lawns and reaching into their libraries with only generalized permission. I fought an urge to run away, as if I had left a bag of Sugar’s best output instead of a delightful new read.
I hope I get to learn who grabbed my mom’s copy of Pachinko. I hope someone lovely got the book that I borrowed from a horrible boss and never gave back; that one needs some good new juju. I hope that books I loaned out and never got back found their ways to Little Free Libraries somewhere.
I’d love to hear your Little Free Library stories. Drop me a line at kate@sugarandkiki.com. Happy reading!