A Box of Books for Readers Who Walk

 

 

The so-called "Little Free Library" movement began in Wisconsin (USA) fourteen years ago. This from the Little Free Library website:

"In 2009, Todd Bol of Hudson, Wisconsin, built a model of a one room schoolhouse. It was a tribute to his mother; she was a teacher who loved to read. He filled it with books and put it on a post in his front yard. His neighbors and friends loved it, so he built several more and gave them away." [Link]

It's become something of a cottage industry. Unfortunately, from my perspective, the pricing model for the boxes themselves is often unreasonable, putting the notion out of reach for many. A typical street box sold on their site averages $350; this does not include the needed installation materials (post, post topper, and installation hardware) or shipping.* I've seen "artisan built" library boxes priced online at over $1000 (also not including shipping or installation supplies).

My brother, Architect I call him on this blog, and I combined our design-and-build forces to create what I call a wee free street library for my neighborhood block.**

I combed local thrift stores and rummage sales to find a decent box. (Unlike Architect, I don't have the core building skills or tools to make one and did not want to trouble him with that.) After a few months I found what looked to have been a homemade wedding gift, a porch mailbox it seemed. Turned on one end, it seemed like something that could work. It's small, but usable (I ended up adding a small shelf for trade and mass market paperbacks.)

 

 I sketched some design ideas and sent them off to my brother. 

 

The more we thought about it, the more I wanted something simple that echoed the lines of our house.

The inspiration for this was the Little Free Library that Architect built for his neighborhood. Its design echoes the design of his own home—which he also designed and built.

 

Architect expanded on my second drawing by adding a more expansive roof, enlarging the door from my sketch, and using beadboard paneling to mimic the siding on our house. He also built the support platform and post then gave it all a layer of primer. Except for the beadboard and door hinge, all the materials were repurposed from Architect's wood shop supplies stash.

 

 

I spray-painted the exterior in a gray shade that mirrored our house, added some white trim, and painted the interior with a nice, deep blue.

 

 

 

The roofing is cedar shakes, professionally applied! A neighbor was having his roof redone this summer. I bartered with the roofer: wee shingles in exchange for a homemade fruit pie and a volume from the reference book set, Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction (Salem Press, 2008). The shakes were also repurposed from another of the roofer's projects.

The final paint job matched the roof shingles to ours and added some signage to the door.

 

Architect kindly did the installation. We'd had the municipal utilities department mark the gas line for us—it runs right along the front sidewalk so we needed to be careful in terms of digging the post hole. I added a concrete stepping stone (left over from some backyard garden work) so passersby can access the book box more easily.

The final view with the first titles! (We've already had some children's books added by a friendly someone.)

 

 And two sweet notes: 

• When opening the front blinds yesterday morning I saw a white-haired gent take a book out. He looked at it, smiled, and held it close to his chest as he walked away. (It was a paperback copy of Dickens' The Pickwick Papers.)
  
  
• When we were putting the post in, a neighbor lady from a few blocks over walked by. I told her what we were doing and she smiled a very happy smile. "Oh good," she said, "now we have one!" (The next nearest street library is 5 blocks away.)
  

 
Such a lovely sense of communal friendship and fun right from the start.

 

Note: Architect is indeed an architect. His firm has specialized in "sustainable and socially conscious architecture since 1972." See this slideshow lecture for the Wright Design Series in Madison, Wisconsin in which he (Lou Host-Jablonski) describes Design Coalition's mission and work over the past 4+ decades.

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* The LFL website does have an FAQ which suggests that they are aware of the $ issue: "I can’t build a library or afford one of yours, what do I do?" Included is this link to a more DIY approach--though their tone is a tad condescending—they refer to those folks as having "the odds ... stacked against you."

** The name Little Free Library is trademarked, though not the idea as far as I can tell. See the LFL FAQ for more info: "Does Little Free Library Ltd have a trademark on the phrase “Little Free Library”?

 

Photo Credits

Stacks of old books: Ed Robertson via Unsplash. Book cover from Amazon. All other images by J.A. Jablonski or Lou Host-Jablonski.

 

 

© J.A. Jablonski 2023. All rights reserved.
 

Cool Book: Subtle Blood by K.J. Charles

 

 

The Will Darling Adventures by K.J. Charles
Cover Art by Tiferet Design

 

 

My review of KJ Charles' Will Darling Adventures has been updated and moved to my author website: J.A. Jablonski. You can link to it here:

KJ Charles | The Will Darling Adventures | Pt. 1
KJ Charles | The Will Darling Adventures | Pt. 2

Cool Book: Slippery Creatures by KJ Charles

 

My review of KJ Charles' Will Darling Adventures has been updated and moved to my author website: J.A. Jablonski. You can link to it here:

KJ Charles | The Will Darling Adventures | Pt. 1
KJ Charles | The Will Darling Adventures | Pt. 2

Cool Book: The Four Profound Weaves: A Birdverse Book by R.B. Lemberg

 

My review of R.B. Lemberg's The Four Profound Weaves: A Birdverse Book  has been updated and moved to my author website: J.A. Jablonski. You can link to it here:

R.B. Lemberg | The Four Profound Weaves

Leaving a place, leaving a space

Image from Pixabay

Growing up, as one of 10 children, personal space was at a premium. There were only 3 bedrooms so we--5 girls and 5 boys--typically doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and quintupled up, depending on how many children were in-home at the time. At one point, I shared the largest of the bedrooms with all 4 of my sisters: 2 bunk beds and one single. It didn't look like the above image, but it certainly felt like it.

As the 2nd youngest girl child, though 7th in the lineup, I didn't have much say in which bed was to be mine. For a time I had the bottom bunk and it was heavenly. It meant I had a space--below--to put my stuff. Said stuff was minimal and consisted mostly of a few library books, toys, and shoes. But it was my space and it was a glorious thing to my young self and much treasured.

Image from Pixabay

At some point, and I don't recall why, I got shifted to the upper bunk. There went my private space. Space and privacy are at a premium in a large family. I am sure my siblings felt as aggrieved as I, but one copes. 

Something stuck with me from that experience, though. I developed the ability to make a space my own, no matter what the space configuration, size, or duration and no matter what small amount of furniture I could cobble together from yard sales, Goodwill, or hand-me-overs.[1] An 8x8 foot dorm room in grad school became a haven that I filled with my books, a typewriter, a bike, a guitar, a small (contraband) kitchen setup, and such art as could be tacked to the one open wall without nails. 

 
My first all-my-own apartment was in Washington D.C., in the Turkey Thicket neighborhood of Brookland.[2] It was in a building like the one at the right. It had one bedroom, a skinny bathroom with a rusty tub, a galley kitchen (that was the home of a fair colony of cockroaches), radiators that hissed and clanked, and two wonderful rooms with beat up wooden floors: the small dining and living rooms. There were safety bars on the windows (which didn't stop someone from throwing a kitchen knife through a back porch window one night) and, for a while, a drug dealing duo lived in the flat above. (I recall one evening hearing a knock-down fight up there with lots of yelling. I opened my door to yell at them to keep it down, only to see two of my students fleeing down the stairs, utterly terrified.)

Some 30 years later, some many apartments and two houses later, I retain the make-the-space-good-while-you-have-it mentality. I did this for 2019 where, for most of the year, I worked at a local university. Yesterday was my last day there. I'd been striking the set for a few weeks, bringing home small things I could hand carry: books, pictures, a flock of dinosaur toys. Here are a few pics from my starting weeks to the end.

One of my favorite pieces of "art" was a framed image of Star Trek's Spock, a promotional poster I saved from my D.C. days when I was an assistant manager for the now defunct B. Dalton Bookseller. The poster was for the then, newly published Spock's World, by Diane Duane. [3]

 

The text below the framed Spock is from Duane's book:

“The spear in the Other's heart
is the spear in your own:
you are he.

There is no other wisdom,
and no other hope for us
but that we grow wise.

-attributed to Surak”

The day before my last day--after the wall art had been removed, the dinos taken home, the books donated or returned to my home library, and the curtains taken down--my colleagues threw me a small goodbye party. I'd never had one before; it was so kind of them. 

There are two pieces of the cake left. We'll have them tonight.

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Images

[1] Floor Plan. Image from Pixabay 

[2] DC apt building 

[3] Spock's World cover from Abe Books

 

Time to Read

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“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”

-- Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Of late I've fallen in love with books again. This happens to me regularly though infrequently. This may sound odd as I am an avid reader and a librarian to boot. But there is the casual reading one engages in day to day, and then there is a kind of deep reading and adoration of all things book. 

My first experience of it was at age four. The Milwaukee Public Library bookmobile neighborhood stop just happened to be directly in front of our house.

 Girls in a bookmobile, St. Paul, MN, ca. 1959.

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Charlie from Willy Wonka
and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

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I tagged along with older brothers and sisters who would allow me to have a book or two in their name. I asked the librarian why I couldn't have my own card. Thinking to deter me, she said I could have one if I could sign my own name. Immediately I ran back into our house and told my Dad what she said. And just as immediately, he sat me down and taught me how to sign (not print) my name. It took him about 20 minutes. And a few minutes after that, I had my very own Golden Ticket!

“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and
slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”

― William Styron, Conversations with William Styron

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Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer is the first of Palmer's Terra Ignota series. It is not a book for the faint of heart: dense prose, very involved storytelling, and massively detailed and rich world building. It took me three tries to get into the swing of reading it. And I must confess that I struggled the whole way. While this book and this series is something rather astounding, I realized that now is not the time for me to read it. My brother, Architect, has read the first 3 books and found them most intriguing . . . so it really is a matter of the right book at the right time. I've gone ahead and bought Books 2 & 3 and will be buying Book 4 when it comes out. At some point, I will return to them.

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Another book I am setting aside is Phillip Pullman's The Book of Dust. Only this book I don't plan to return to. I was seriously conflicted by his His Dark Materials trilogy (though found the sidebar book, Once Upon a Time in the North really quite fun and well conceived). But for all the gorgeous imaginings, the underlying anti-religion theme just annoyed me. I am not religious--I am a skeptic in fact--but I deplore proselytization on any side of any fence. My annoyance with The Book of Dust reminded me of my annoyance with much of Sheri S. Tepper's later eco-feminist works. Both Pullman and Tepper are powerful storytellers--I am just not keen on their message-makings.

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Not all of my reading of late is fiction, however. I recently returned to a book I'd worked at reading back in the 1990s when I was working on what I thought was my dissertation topic on 9th century European manuscripts. The book was the then newly published The Book of Memory by Mary Carruthers. It was (and still is) and astounding work of scholarship and deep, reflective, intellectual work. 

I say I worked at reading it because Carruthers' writing demanded more historical understanding than I had mastered at that point. Reading it again this past weekend was no easier, but because I was reading it for a different purpose,* I was able to let the power of her mind simply be rather than be intimidating. 

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* The reason I picked up Carruthers again is that I am working at writing a book myself: a science fiction novel. It has absolutely nothing to do with the Middle Ages or medieval manuscripts. What I needed was a new way of understanding how the mind works when memorizing massive amounts of information. The Book of Memory is one of a handful of serious scholarly books I hung on to. I knew I'd need her again some day . . . though I didn't think it would be in the context of science fiction!

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“I have lived a thousand lives and I’ve loved a thousand loves.
I’ve walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read.”
― George R.R. Martin 

A Hobbitish Affair

If there is one thing my crew is good at it's theme parties -- e.g., Dr. Who (Part 1 and Part 2) and our occasional, friendly wizardish group's gathering. We even have parties for things we may not like. In this instance, it was the last of Peter Jackson's cinema renderings of J.R.R. Tolkien's whimsical book The Hobbit: or There and Back and Again. The "not liking" has to do with a simple, even whimsical tale being transmorgified into a bloated, faux epic.

 

(L) The book I read at age 12.
(R) Movie poster of the latest movie.

It took me years before I would watch Mr. Jackson's The Lord of the Rings. Like many who love the books, I have my own images and ideas of the stories. And since I also was the person who initially processed the original, handwritten LOTR manuscripts for Marquette University's Special Collections and University Archives back in the 1970s, my attachment to the original works by Professor Tolkien runs pretty deep.

When I heard that Mr. Jackson had decided to make three movies out of a slim-volumed tale Tolkien had created as a night-time story for his children, I knew pretty much right away that I wouldn't be seeing them anytime soon.  

But I am a purist, and my aforementioned crew is hardier when it comes to movie adaptations than I. So for each of the 3 movies, we have gathered, hobbit-like, to share much food and much mirth, before those that will head off to the movie theater. This year it was our turn to host the gathering. As it was so close to the December holidays, we made it a combined Christmas and Cinema Party.

Inspired by the presentation approach my brother Architect uses when giving tours of the straw-clay Natural House he designed and built -- which entails posting informative signs throughout the home -- and inspired, too, by the sheer fun of the event, we "decorated" primarily with signs. 

These are the editions I read in high school and college.

The painting on the mantle was done by my sister,
Door County (WI) artist Jan Marie Jablonski.

"Party Tree (Seasonal Variation)"

The wood print behind the tree is
Proud Woman by artist Judith W. Nelson.

Over the entry to the dining room.

There are three pieces of dragon art in the dining room. Obviously only the one in flight could be Smaug!

Those of you familiar with The Lord of the Rings will recall the mithril-edged Doors of Durin that lead into Moria. 

Image source/credit

"Ennyn Durin Aran Moria. Pedo Mellon a Minno. Im Narvi hain echant. Celebrimbor o Eregion teithant i thiw hin."

"The Doors of Durin, Lord of Moria. Speak, friend, and enter. I, Narvi, made them. Celebrimbor of Hollin drew these signs."

Our version, leading thru the doors into the kitchen, where the party buffet was laid out, was much more prosaic.

The most grand piece of all was the oil painting of Lorien of Middle Earth by my sister, Door County (WI) artist, Jan Marie Jablonski, gave to my husband and me as a wedding gift. The signage for this echoed the architect's tradition of the truth window.

"A truth window (or truth wall) is an opening in a wall surface, created to reveal the layers or components within the wall. In a strawbale house, a truth window is often used to show the walls are actually made from straw bales. A small section of a wall is left unplastered on the interior, and a frame is used to create a window which shows only straw, which makes up the inside of the wall.M Many designs exist for truth windows. Glass may be placed over the window, or an openable wooden panel, or it may be a simple framed opening." [Wikipedia entry]

In our case, we imagined the window looking into Middle Earth!

The dining table was elegantly dressed.

Included were sparkling (non-alcoholic) wines from the Prancing Pony pub in Bree and . . .

 
. . . wee dragons guarding their golden hoards (chocolate coins) as party favors.

Not even the bathroom was overlooked. Though I confess my inner snark emerged. Fortunately, all guests found it amusing.

The meal itself was potluck: 2 large pots of homemade deliciousness: cream of chicken/wild rice soup and midwestern chili (i.e., not too spicy); a fresh vegetable platter; sourdough and French bread with loads of Wisconsin butter; and West Coast smoked salmon and crackers. The dessert was something special. Asked to bring one of his special fruit pies, Architect -- anticipating another murderous Jacksonian cinematic debacle -- demured saying,

"Methinks that, with the experience that we will face and need to endure, we will require something stronger than mere pie. I'm planning a battle dessert."

Said dessert turned out to be a thoroughly decadent, very rich bittersweet chocolate bread pudding topped with hot butter-whiskey sauce!

Thus fortified with good food and good cheer, the movie-goers departed to meet their fate. Two hours later I texted my sister Cee: "So, how was it?"

"Just got out," she replied, "You know . . . we . . . liked it! General opinion! So surprising! Best of the three somehow. And we were so stoked to hate it [like the others] . . . go figure!"

I'm thinking it was the battle dessert that made the difference.