Heather Pruiksma has always fantasized about being a librarian—a romantic profession in her eyes. She has an affinity for books and finds herself drawn to organizing and caring for them, even when they are not her own. As a frequent traveler, she has often stayed at hostels and other places where there are community bookshelves for passersby to take or leave a book. Each time she happens upon one she gravitates toward it, ready to straighten and rearrange its titles. “I just always want to be taking care of everyone else’s bookshelves, and I love the idea of free books,” she explained. It was close to home, however, on a walk in Westford, that she happened upon her first Little Free Library—a small wooden structure not unlike a mailbox that a steward maintains as a place for a neighborhood to share books. Immediately inspired and enamored, she knew she wanted her own.
Little Free Library is a non-profit organization that was started by Todd Bol in Hudson, Wisconsin, in 2009. The first Little Free Library was a wooden box decorated to look like a quaint one-room schoolhouse, with a door that opened to a shelf of books he hoped to share with friends and neighbors. Bol stuck it in his front yard, and it was so well received that, with help from a business partner, he began to build more of the libraries to give away.
Today the libraries can be purchased online, or people can build their own and pay a one-time fee to register them and receive a plaque and charter number. Registration puts the library on the Little Free Library map, where people can search for libraries in their area. Today, there are over 100,000 registered libraries in more than 100 countries. Some of these are in yards and parks surrounding Harvard.
Like many other stewards, Pruiksma ended up receiving her Little Free Library as a gift. After her first encounter with one on a walk with her boyfriend, she hesitated to start her own, unsure if it would get any visitors on the quiet Ayer side street where she lives. Regardless, on her next birthday, her boyfriend gifted her one he had found on Etsy. Together, they painted and installed it, and Pruiksma stocked it with books she had finished. She soon realized that her location lends itself well to a Little Free Library, since it gets a lot of foot traffic, but is not too busy an area for people to stop and browse.
Pruiksma checks the library daily, and estimates that it gets a few visitors per week and more now, during the pandemic.
An unspoken fraternity
As a Little Free Library steward, she feels like part of a community, “an unspoken fraternity” of book-lovers who tend each other’s shelves.
Sometimes Pruiksma will get larger donations when people drop off bags of books. Some go straight into the library, others onto an inventory bookshelf she keeps inside. Others are in such poor condition they end up in the trash. Some, especially those too large to fit in her library, go into a box in the back of her car that she uses to stock other little libraries in the area.
Sometimes young library visitors will leave Pruiksma notes. Her favorites are the “love notes” she gets from kids expressing their appreciation for the library. “It’s very gratifying and it’s really cute and I love it a lot,” she said with audible pleasure as she recalled some of the notes that had shown up in the library.
Other young patrons leave requests for what they would like to see more of in the library. Pruiksma keeps these in mind when she is browsing for inventory at a yard or book sale.
One of the aspects of stewardship that Pruiksma loves most is giving new life to something that might otherwise go to waste, “I love to save things and reuse things, and I think there’s a little bit of that as well, where you’re taking something and sharing it and getting other people to use something that might otherwise just sit around.” While she is careful about the condition of the books she keeps in the library, Pruiksma says she sometimes rescues books from the dump. On these occasions, she said she feels “the joy of reclaiming something from its demise.”
While many local stewards mentioned that the pandemic has caused an increase in library traffic, one said it was the reason she started hers.
One voracious reader’s solution to shuttered public libraries
When public libraries shut down this spring because of the coronavirus, Jenna Brownson found herself at a loss. A former trustee of the Littleton Public Library, Brownson is a voracious reader—the 20-to-30-books-checked-out-at-a-time kind of voracious.
For 2020, she set herself the goal of reading 104 books, two per week, so when the library closed, it hit her hard. “I couldn’t just go to my library and browse around, and [I] felt that there was something missing in my community experience, so [I] made the little free library to try to continue to have community in a time where we’re being told that we really can’t, at least … in the ways that we have grown accustomed to.”
A Little Free Library in Littleton, just over the town line on Harvard Road. (Courtesy photo)
Brownson’s library, which was installed on July 15 and is located on Harvard Road in Littleton, is built entirely from repurposed materials: the frame is an old bookshelf, its pitched roof is made from leftover wood and roofing tiles, the door is from a sheet of plexiglass she found on the curbside. “That was … a rewarding part of the process,” she said, explaining that she liked the idea of finding new uses for old items.
While she devours pages at a rapid pace, Brownson recognizes that finishing a book can be a daunting task for some. She hopes that her little library might encourage slower readers to indulge in books at their own pace, without having to worry about due dates and overdue fines. “People who take from a Little Free Library can keep the books forever,” she explained, adding later, “In that way it serves a different sort of need based on different sorts of readers.”
Discovery is another value that comes up often when talking with Little Free Library stewards. Because anyone can take or leave a book and there is no expectation of returning it, the content of the libraries is ever-changing, and is curated by a diverse set of readers. At a little library there is no expectation for a certain title, author, or genre to be available, so patrons reach inside with open minds.
The Little Free Library at the corner of Elm and Sherman streets in Devens. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)
A steady stream of readers
This is something a steward in Devens has taken advantage of in recent months. Debra Rivera installed her first Little Free Library in the rotary park across from her home a few years ago. The structure was gifted to her by her three daughters for Mother’s Day, and since then it has gotten so much use that she is now in the process of installing a second one beside it, specifically for children’s books.
Rivera can see her library from her window and takes note of the traffic it gets. Especially during the pandemic, she has seen a steady stream of bikers, dog walkers, and casual strollers, many of whom stop to check out her library and perhaps take a seat on a nearby bench to read.
With the library getting so much attention, she recognized an opportunity to engage people with current events. Inspired by growing conversations about the police killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, she ordered some books on diversity and racial issues to incorporate into her library’s inventory.
Her hope is that someone will be encouraged to read about a topic they might not have on their own. “Maybe not everybody is going to go out and look for those books, but if they happened upon them when they are opening up the Little Free Library, then I’m hoping somebody will take a book and learn something they didn’t know before.”
Rivera also talked about the library as a way to bring her community together, a sentiment that reflects the core motivation of each steward who spoke with the Press. “If you love reading, it just opens up the world for you,” she said. “I’m hoping to foster a love of reading, but mostly it’s just to foster more community. … It’s nice to have … a common thing that everybody is interested in and wants to participate in.”
Free books at the Transfer Station
While there are no Little Free Libraries registered in Harvard, there are similar projects in town. One of these is a community book shed created at the Transfer Station by a local Girl Scout troop.
The Girl Scouts' book shed at the Harvard Transfer Station. (Courtesy photo)
The idea stemmed from Girl Scout Sophie Thompson’s bat mitzvah community service project, in which she collected and donated books to Boston Children’s Hospital through a program called Reach Out and Read. She and three of her troop members, Rebecca Miller, Robin Miller, and Camille Gomez, had observed the large number of gently used books being tossed in the paper recycling receptacle at the Transfer Station, and wanted to create a sustainable place for people to leave these books to be reused. “By creating this space to share books, we simultaneously wanted to promote literacy within this community for all ages, and we thought that this was the perfect way,” Thompson explained in an email to the Press.
With Grace Miller, mother of Rebecca and Robin Miller, and Harvard librarian Abby Kingsbury acting as their advisors, the girls went before the Select Board to get permission for the project, and raised over $1,000 for materials. They purchased wood, paneling, and asphalt shingles, and built the shed themselves based on a plan provided by Sandra Gomez, an architect and mother of Camille Gomez. The shed, which is 4 feet by 8 feet, works the same way Little Free Libraries do: people can drop off or pick up books there with no expectation of returning them.
Many of the books that end up at the shed are donated to organizations that serve sick or underserved youth communities. During normal times, the shed is open during Transfer Station hours but, due to the pandemic, it is not currently operating.
A little library for Harvard, with a twist
An official Little Free Library may soon open its doors within the town’s borders. Jeanne Schkeryantz has known about the practice for years. She saw her first Little Free Library in a bustling Canadian neighborhood and was delighted by it. “It brought a smile to my heart. The randomness and surprise was total joy!” she wrote in an email to the Press.
After that, Little Free Libraries seemed to sprout up everywhere Schkeryantz went, and she started thinking about opening her own. At the time, she lived in Fishers, Indiana, but a job change both interrupted her library plans and brought her to Harvard. She wasn’t sure if the more rural landscape of her new neighborhood would be conducive to library stewardship, so she put off the project.
She soon noticed that her street attracted frequent and friendly foot traffic. “I see so many walkers go by our house, and they wave if I’m outside. I want to invite them to take a book. Or a piece of small art. To contribute if [they] feel led, and share a piece of themselves. To share the love of books and handmade creations.”
Schkeryantz is now in the process of designing her own Little Free Library with help from a family friend. It is set to open in spring of 2021, and will have an extra layer of sentimentality to it. A poet and artist herself, she hopes to stock her library with her own original works and the work of others she has met around the world. She has friends in Ottawa, Canada; the Republic of Malta; Hamburg, Germany; Marmaris, Turkey, and India who have all agreed to contribute their work. She hopes other local authors will add to her shelves as well.
To her, Little Free Libraries bring something to a community that even a public library cannot: “The spirit of community generosity, the intimacy of neighbors serving neighbors.” This, more than anything, was the message of little library stewards, that their shelves are a place for people of all ages and interests to gather, to indulge in a fortuitous moment of gratitude or generosity, to know that they have shared an experience with an unknown web of others in their community, and, of course, a place to foster and enable a love of reading.
