little_free_library raze you have to walk to the end of your street to find it. past an old tree with a stump that won't leave its side. remnant of a conjoined twin that didn't make it. past your landlord's house, with the rusted basketball hoop no one uses and the new car with vanity plates. past a miserable-looking man with thinning hair who steps onto his porch to grab a plastic bag heavy with something you can't see and heads back inside after grumbling what might be "hello" or "go fuck yourself". past a brown parasol asleep above a patio table. a limp cloak without a body to fill it. what you're looking for is a wooden box on a picket, with a front-facing gabled roof and two tiny french doors. on the left pane of glass you see flowers and butterflies. on the right, the colours of the ukrainian flag. there are books about death, romance, obsession, and war. there's a book about a serial killer, and a book about a lonely engineer who builds a man so she'll have a date for her sister's wedding. you donate a book you bought last year. something you read once and won't want to read again. you take a paperback printing of ashley audrain's "the push", drawn to a cover image that shows the blue tongue of a playground slide. when you get home, you open what you've borrowed and read the first sentence on the first page: "your house glows at night like everything inside is on fire." and you wonder how this woman you've never met could know you so well. 220529 ... kerry a ten minute walk from joy's house, on seacliff ave, in san francisco, overlooking china beach is the little free swiss library. a mural of the swiss alps spans a wall behind it. i remember seeing the words "swiss consulate" when i stopped there, but according to google maps, the swiss consulate in san francisco is on the other side of the city, near coit tower. regardless, this is one of the better little free libraries i've visited so far. one whole shelf was kids books, both in french and english, even some french audiobooks. the other shelf had two tattered books about art--chinese art and american modern art--and a copy of rebecca solnit's "infinite city: a san francisco atlas." i grabbed the chinese art book and the rebecca solnit book, and flipped through them at night while the fog horns moaned in the distance. 220529 ... tender_square you have to walk to the street adjacent, the one with the name you can never remember, despite the fact that they all end with the suffix “wood.” past the neighbour with the thick slabs of starburst-core stumps that he plans to slice and sell. past the row of overgrown lawns, the true believing do-gooders on a quest to protect pollinators. past the house with the old man who looks like jimmy dean in his cowboy hat, who recently placed a toilet next to his front porch, unsold from his paltry weekend yard sale. past the groggy man on the corner who bends to pick up his puppy’s shit, the heat worming its way through the bag and onto his skin the way the morning’s humidity marries sweat. you nearly missed the site; parked cars and shrubs obscured the tiny shack-on-post with its clapboard roof patinaed white. rustic strap hinges swing the single glass door open and shut. there are books about educational theory, structured computer organization, about nancy drew using her sleuthing skills to rescue her father from desperate thieves. there’s a book about a teenager with druid-blood in her veins, and a collection of sensual stories from harlequin. you don’t donate anything. you pick up a title published by a local bookshop, a store that’s popular for its aesthetics: black-and-white checkerboard floors, handwritten reviews from antiquarians, a typewriter in the basement for writing anonymous notes. a place so curated it hurts. you hate this store precisely because everyone loves it. the book is assemblage of typewriter notes. you flip to the first page and it chaps your ass that these words speak to you now, at the crossroads of past and future: “life, like this typewriter, has no backspace. type strongly and don’t look back.” 220531 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I read this weeks ago and forgot to add that my neighbourhoods have installed similar things! The first Montreal one I spotted was pre-pandemic, downtown - on Crescent street, near where I work. Others, last year, appeared along the lakeside roads of Dorval and Pointe Claire. "They should put one nearer to us," I wistful-ized then. Lo! This year a box was set up on the sidewalk beside Surrey_Park, two blocks from my parents' house. It looks like a two-storey house, with upstairs books and downstairs books. The upstairs has a balcony. I left a dime there once - I'd picked it up off the sidewalk, but it seemed a trivial thing to keep. A child might be more excited to find it. At other times, I put in mystery-thrillers given to me by my uncle (the middle child between my mom and her energetic but neglectful MENSA-joining brother). I put in copies of books I'd inadvertently gathered two of: Emma, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. The oddest thing I spotted was a set of five or six alien conspiracy/UFO books. I imagined a disgruntled widow getting rid of her late husband's collection. Other things aren't so strange, but disparate as a collection: A stocky dictionary of biochemistry terms. An evangelical pamphlet about women in Islam. A republished essay on anarcho-syndicalism with a foreword by Noam Chomsky (I took that, though I know Chomsky more for his linguistics). At one point, the bottom storey was reserved for French books and the top one for Enlgish. They have since intermingled. Take that, Francois Legault. 220811 ... e_o_i *English No, I speak Eglishn. Neglihs. Negligent Egglish. Pah, it doesn't matter what language you speak. (Says she who just applied again to be a Sociolinguistics TA.) 220811 ... nr is it pedantic of me to think it's a bit redundant they're called this, rather than "little library," since all libraries are free? they are cute though, and nice additions to neighbourhoods, and nice little companions to big and even bigger free libraries. 220811 ... e_o_i No, you're absolutely right (she answers two years later). Some libraries have membership fees, but the borrowing itself is free, so why should a box of books bill itself on its costlessness? Also, something like "little library" or "mini library" or "library in a box" would be snappier. 240824 ... Soma I never thought the "free" was about cost, but more about freedom of action. You can take or keep the book, or freely exchange if you were so inclined, so tis a "free library", instead of a "lending library". Though I must admit, to drop the word would be snappier. The one in my neighborhood is filled with wolf spiders. 240825 ... warmthofrelease I hope the owner of whoever's hands took the Miles_Davis autobiography that I gave to that cute little cottage on a post with the plexiglass window has appreciated it, cared for it, and ideally has passed it on to someone else to do the same. 240825 what's it to you? who go blather from