Little Free Libraries

I love my Grandmother’s neighborhood. It is filled with many different types of houses from Spanish design, to the Thomas Kinkade inspired, to 1970s modern, and the odd mansion. Her neighborhood is one of the oldest neighborhoods of our town, and often regarded as one of the classiest. There is a certain snootiness that usually goes hand and hand with the neighborhood. It has the charm of South and Southern hospitality. It would make sense that my grandmother lives in this neighborhood. She is a southern belle  at heart. I can totally see her being right at home being the lady of a sweeping plantation before the Civil War.

 

Every Thursday I clean my Grandmother’s house for her. I love my drive through her neighborhood as she lives right at the heart of it back against the water. I often take a different route every time because the houses are all unique and the next is just as beautiful as the last. Even the houses that have had their polish fade, are beautiful in their age. Maybe it is my sentimentality, maybe it is this town has always been a bit of home no matter where my family moved to growing up.

 

Anyways, as I drive through the neighborhood each week I realized that they have embraced the movement for the Little Free Library. I love reading as I’ve mentioned in a previous post. This week I decided to stop at a few of the Little Libraries as I drove into Grandmother’s. There seems to be one every couple streets. The sprawling neighborhood begs to be explored and maybe one day I will venture to all of them.

 

The Little Library system is fairly straightforward. You take a book. You leave a book. There is a little box set up in front of a ‘steward’s’ home. The box often has a door with a window on it so that you can see the books that are inside while giving the books protection from the elements. When you find a book you would like you simply exchange a book you have for the one you want. Everyone, I think, has a book or two lying about that will never be read again. Why not share them with someone else that would enjoy the book when you, perhaps, did not?

 

Yesterday was a total win for my LL experience. The one that I usually hit up was sadly lacking, but it is on the main vein through the neighborhood. I was happy, though, to see that my book I had placed in there about a month ago was gone. I did find a copy of Nim’s Island. I got it for my daughter. She’s just now getting into reading on her own. So even though I didn’t find something I was super excited about at that LL I was certain that I would find something at one of the other ones. I jumped back into the car and winded my way through the neighborhood looking for the next LL. A couple streets down and one over I found my next LL. I was pleased to see that this library was practically bursting with books so I scanned through the titles. On the bottom shelf 4 from the right was a hardcover copy of Wicked. TOTAL SCORE!!! It has been something I have been interested in, but I have not had the chance to actually read it. And trading our second copy of a Tom Clancy novel, it was a no-brainer. At my third, and final LL of the day I found a different Clancy book that was missing in Husband’s collection. BAM! I knew I would win some brownie points for that.

 

I absolutely love the idea of the Little Library. I think that I would like to put one at our home, but I’m not sure if I will. I live in a very small neighborhood and there is only residents that come here as we aren’t a through-way for anything. Maybe I could petition to have one put in where our neighborhood meets the main road. I bet that would at least generate a better book turnaround.
Here are my Library treasures I’ve acquired. The Murder on the Titanic is from my first Little Library experience.