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.

___________________________________________

* 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.
 

An Old Year Passes | New Things in the New Year

 

Best wishes of the 2018 Yule Season!

"Winter is the time for comfort, for good food
and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand
and for a talk beside the fire:
it is the time for home."

Edith Sitwell

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I am hoping for new things in 2019. Writing mostly . . . but also some things made.

A fantastical picture book of a typospherian nature.

A starting, finally, on an SF novel that's been over 30 years in the imagining.

 

A mystery novel involving a carillon!
[Hopeman Memorial Carillon, University of Rochester]

I'll be reviving this blog as I progress. There are old stories to update and new stories to tell. And, if things go well, some announcements to share!

“Life rises out of death, death rises out of life;
in being opposite they yearn to each other,
they give birth to each other and are forever reborn.
And with them, all is reborn,
the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars.
In life is death. In death is rebirth. What then is life without death?
Life unchanging, everlasting, eternal?
What is it but death-death without rebirth?”

―  Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore, 1972

Blue for Birds

[Source]

This past year we moved, somewhat unexpectedly, from a lovely 1914-era flat to an only slightly more recent 1920s-era bungalow. Moving in midsummer there was no time to do much yard-wise other than add some containers of kitchen herbs just outside the back door.

In the fall, finally settled in and mostly unpacked, we assessed what might be done. The maple tree would be a centerpiece for it all. Or so we thought . . .

Because the tree hadn't been pruned in awhile and we were worried about its branches resting on the electrical wires (and possibly our neighbor's garage roof), we had an arborist some in to take a look at the situation. Much to our great disappointment, we learned that the tree--largely because it had not been pruned, likely in a very great while, had "misgrown." The trunk was twinned and was at great risk of splitting and other large branches were causing problems as well.

The arborist described it as a "Danger Tree" and recommended it be not simply pruned but removed altogether. That will happen in a few weeks and gone with it is our pleasant daydream of a Tolkien-esque Party Tree. What we'll be left with (other than a much welcome stack of firewood to season over the coming months) is a very large, very open, unshaded space.

The loss of this tree is hard, dangerous though it may be. My Beloved Spousal Unit and I both grew up in many-treed yards and, while we are largely urban dwellers, we treasure having trees always and always near us. Once it has been removed we'll be looking to possibly replace it. But for now, given a modest budget, we'll let that go until next year. In the meantime, the focus will be on creating a small herb and vegetable garden. One part of that will be a bird bath.

 

[Source]

The store-boughten bird baths are nice but we wanted something a little less standard. Last year in our small (last second, we just moved in herb garden) we had a terracotta planter base set atop a terracotta vase. Since it wasn't meant to be permanent, the one was not attached to the other. Which worked fine for the birds, but not so fine when our resident squirrels--Harry, Twitch, and D'Artagnan--discovered it! Many mornings I would come out to find the bath in two pieces, unbroken fortunately.

 
This year we've decided to go a little fancier and sturdier. And is our wont, we wanted to make it ourselves by reusing materials. First up was the base from last summer's bird bath. We made occasional visit to Goodwill, where we found two possible basins.

 

Testing them out, though, we found that the handmade pottery basin was out of proportion and too small. We could also see that the basin really wasn't deep enough to provide sufficient bathing space.
|

 

And, following the Goldilocks routine, the second find turned out to be too large! Keeping the 3 squirrels in mind, it also looked at though it would be top heavy and likely to fall over when the beasties jumped up on to it.

The whole idea of a terracotta design went out the window, though, when we noticed that the base-vase has a long crack along its middle circumference. So, back to the hunt it was! Goodwill is always good, but Savers in Madison has been a real gold mine for many of our household or, in my case, theater and art projects. We lucked out when we found a large ceramic vase and a glazed serving bowl.

The assembly wasn't too much of a chore at all. First, the design issue: which way should the base go! 

Either way looked nice, so we went with the version on the left.  The next step was to give it some weight. We had some sand leftover from our Wisconsin winter snow-n-ice stash. That went in nearly to the brim.

 

We cleaned the brim of the vase and the bottom of the basin with isopropyl alcohol . . .

 

 . . . and then ran a line of silicone adhesive around the brim edge.

Once the basin was secured, we let it stand in our front porch area so the adhesive could cure for 24 hours.

This afternoon, taking advantage of the first truly gloriously warm day of Spring, and despite there being no pots of herbs to keep it company just yet, we placed it in our kitchen garden area and filled it with water. 

Now . . . it's just a matter of waiting for the birds to find it!

 [Source]

Making a Fictional World Real, Piece by Piece

Image source/credit

"Words ought to be a little wild,

for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking."

~ John Maynard Keynes ~

Worldbuilding is a long time fascination of mine. Watching others craft worlds is a particular delight.These authors are my favorites:

James Gurney's Dinotopia series (See his website for the books here: http://www.dinotopia.com/)

• Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time
• Dinotopia: The World Beneath
• Dinotopia: First Flight
• Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara

Ursula Le Guin (Pretty much anything. She is a Master World Builder.)
(See her website here: http://www.ursulakleguin.com/)

• The Dispossessed
• The Left Hand of Darkness
•  Her Earthsea Trilogy (6 books)
• Changing Planes
• The Birthday of the World: And Other Stories

Anne McCaffrey
(See the website for the series here: http://pernhome.com/pern/)

• Her Pern series, especially the first six published.
• (The later ones written by her son Todd McCaffrey are a tad mechanistic and lack Anne's flair for description and character.) Full list of titles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pern_books

Wright, Austin Tappan. Islandia. NY: Farrar & Rinehart, 1942.
(Also available in modern paperback reprints.)

Several years ago Hoja, my friend and creative colleague, and I found ourselves worldbuilding by happenstance.  She and I took to playing Scrabble at family gatherings. To make it more fun, we changed the rules:

• No keeping points.
• We had to stick with the 7 tiles of a standard game.
• The words had to be "invented words".
• As each word was placed on the board, the player had to provide a "lengthy, detailed, credible faux definition and use the word in a complete sentence."

Image source/credit

 

For our amusement we took a photo of the board at the end of our first game, and then the second.  By the third time we played we realized we both seemed to be pulling our words and their definitions from some shared place. 

It's been three years of worldmaking now. Our imagined place does not yet have a name (I have one in mind but we've yet to agree if that is it.) Based on coffeeshop or dinnertime conversations (often while playing our tile game), we've a general sense of the geography. Hoja says she is going to see if she can sketch out a map of things.

Once we even tried to create the recipe for a food word we came up with for a grain dish. It turned out splendidly! And while making it as part of a meal one evening we discussed the likely regional variations of the dish - which we've both tried making since then.

After a while, using a modern Scrabble set seemed odd. I began to think about what "playing tiles" would be like in our imagined place.

That's all it took for me to want to actually make a game set for us. In doing so, the story continued to make itself. I discovered that our fellow imaginaries like to make their own tiles and playing cloths, or have a set made by a friend or long distant ancestor.  Here is what I made for Hoja and myself. We are still working out the back stories for our respective game sets.

One set of tiles I made using Sculpey plastic clay which I stamped and then painted. I deliberately let the tiles over-bake so they'd look more like old bone.

Hoja's set I made from leather. I had a small stash of cowhide pieces in several colors. I cut tiles from each, hand-lettered them with India ink, and added a splash of metallic gold to make the letters stand out.

The modern cardboard board was replaced by a two-sided fabric playing cloth. One side was made from upholstery fabric with a pattern that could be used for a traditional tiles layout. The reverse was made from some dark blue cotton velveteen. Hoja is fond of ground ivy so I embroidered large ivy leaves on hers. Mine captured another world: the map of Anarres from Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed.

 

As I sewed and embroidered I thought of the imagined people with whom we might play. This led me to think that the playing cloth might be used for other games as well. So the finished playing set included a stitched bag with marker pieces: sea shells for me, river stones for Hoja.  I found some green dice, a pair for each of us, and finished things up with a pair of varnished chopsticks to hold the tiles during play.

The bags for the tiles, dice, and playing markers I made from an old pair of flannel travel bags for shoes, trimmed short to be more portable.

The sticks were rolled up inside the playing cloth and the roll was then tied with a leather strip.

I couldn't wait until the Yule season to give Hoja her gift! We met at a park overlooking a lake. I told her the story of the games' making. It sparked another round of shared story building: names of people, descriptions of a house one had inherited and was now making her own, and the beginnings of the cartography of the place.

Our land is not perfect, nor are its people. Nor are we as we create it all. And at this point there is no real end goal. Hoja and I have talked about collaborative writing projects, but this land may or may not be the setting for our stories.  And although we've had the chance to see each other since that afternoon by the lake, we've both been terribly busy. We have yet to actually play our now-real fictional game. 

"You can change your world by changing your words....

Remember, death and life are in the power of the tongue."

~ Joel Osteen ~