Return of the Mill Street Little Free Library

After two years out of action, I've finally rebuilt and installed a Little Free Library at my home. This has been a long time coming: something delayed by life and depression and all the other things that make up life, and it's nice to finally have it back in action.

I'd long wanted to have a Little Free Library on my street, and early in the Covid pandemic, I decided it was as good a time as any to build one. I gathered up scraps of everything I needed around the house: random pieces of wood, paint, hardware from old cabinets, and put it together. I think the only thing that I ended up purchasing was the plexiglass for the door and the name plate. It served its time well, and it turned out to be an excellent way to get rid of ARCs and other books that I needed to get out of the house.

But in July 2023, ants infiltrated the post: I'd picked wood that hadn't been treated, so it didn't last long in the ground. I pulled it up to the top of my driveway, thinking that I'd get to it in due time.

Due time turned out to be just over two years. 2023 was a bad fall for me, and I had zero motivation for a project like this. I should have brought it in, but it ended up sitting out in the weather for a while, and as a result, the roof and shingles rotted off, and I was beginning to think that I'd need to start over, which didn't motivate me to get it done.

After months sitting at the top of my driveway, and while working on some other stuff around the back yard, I realized that I was tired of looking at and unscrewed the rotted out post, and finally took stock of whether or not it was salvageable. It was in rough shape: I'd leaned it up so that the door was facing up, so water had gotten into the box itself, as well as the plywood I'd used for the roof. I'd cut up a piece of siding to make shingles, and most of those had come off, the paint was peeling in places, but the rest of the box seemed okay.

So, I set about with a scraper and got off as much paint as I could with some leftover stripper. The roof was a total loss, and I was afraid that the bottom was as well, but the rest was still in okay shape, with a bit of work.

I'm loathe to spend money on something like this, especially when what I needed was so small: surely there'd be some scrap plywood or something out in the community, and as it turned out, my brother knew of some pieces that were headed to the dumpster on a construction site that he was working at. He grabbed them for me, and I got to work.

The paint was the hardest part: two years of water and elements had battered it, but it was still a paint to take off: I used what paint stripper I had, and ended up buying a used power sander and some heavy grit sandpaper to take the rest of it off. The roof came off and I replaced it with the new wood (as it turned out, the bottom didn't need to be replaced), and screwed it into place. I consulted with my brother again – he runs a house painting company – and he ended up giving me a high-grade primer and exterior paint that he swore by that was left over from a job, Over the next couple of days, I repainted the entire thing, reinstalled the door, plexiglass, and new hardware, and it was ready to go – except for a post.

Weirdly, it was a post that held me up for so long: I didn't have anything around the house, and I hadn't really found anything suitable casually looking around. My family came to the rescue again: my dad happened to have a steel post that once held a satellite dish that he was getting rid of, and with a bit of work with a sander and drill, it did the trick.

I was now running up against the clock: I was headed down to Pennsylvania for the Thanksgiving holiday early the next morning, and we were expecting snow in the near future. I ended up coming home from work, finished installing the flange to attach the box, and with night falling, I dug out a hole next to my driveway and set about getting it secured in the ground. After some more work with a drill and screws, I had it secured and loaded up with books. With one last pass with some spray paint on the post, it was open for business.

I updated the record online with a new image and to get it back on the map, and by the time I'd gotten back from Thanksgiving, it was clear that there were already people using it: some of the books I'd placed in there were gone and replaced with some new titles. It's gratifying to see: I get a ton of review copies for my work on this newsletter, and I'm happy to have an outlet that lets me get them to people who'll check them out and enjoy them.

This whole process reminded me of why these little boxes are so appealing. It's not (just) the whimsical and high-minded mindset about giving away free books and so on: it's that they're tangible reminders of community that you might not see otherwise. People share and take books, sometimes just to get rid of them, sometimes, because a particular title catches their eye, sometimes to resell, and sometimes because they want to make sure that a book has a future beyond a dumpster.

But there's also the enthusiasm behind them: my neighbors were happy to see that it was back, while my family were more than happy to donate some of the materials that were needed to get it fixed up. When I encounter one, I always take a moment to check it out and see what it holds: not just to see if there's a book that I'd like to read, but to see what the people around me are reading. They're like tiny windows into the character of a community, from their construction to their contents, and I'm looking forward to seeing what folks will take out of mine in the months and years ahead.