My neighborhood’s HOA sometimes lives up to the stereotype: useful in some regards but too expensive and strict to the point of nitpicky about the smallest aesthetic things. (If you’re on our HOA and somehow found this itsy-bitsy blog: Please don’t take this as a personal attack! I’m just being a little snark!) So I was surprised and delighted when they took my suggestion to start a Little Free Library and made it happen. Within a month or two of my tentative email, they’d ordered the library itself, registered it officially, and named me the steward. Shortly after that, it was installed and ready to be filled up with books.
As a real-life librarian, I take stewarding my neighborhood’s Little Free Library seriously. While ours is a rather small and simple LFL compared to some I’ve seen, I try to make sure it’s always well-stocked with good books for all ages and audiences.
I’ve learned a lot in the past year or so of stewarding our Little Free Library. Whether you’re a fellow LFL steward like me or you know next to nothing about a Little Free Library, I hope you can find something useful in this post.
What’s a Little Free Library?
A Little Free Library is exactly what it sounds like. You can take a book without formally checking it out and you don’t have to return it. For the sake of your fellow readers, you’re supposed to leave a book when you take one. That said, it functions under the honor system, and no one is going to hunt you down if you stumble upon a Little Free Library and take a book but don’t have one on hand to leave in its place. (Maybe you can go back later and rectify the situation though, eh?)
It’s a beautiful and relatively simple way to promote community and literacy.
While some people bootleg their lending libraries, we went through the official channels when we founded ours. The HOA paid the registration fee and bought the library on the LFL website. (You don’t need to buy one of their libraries. I’ve seen them in all shapes and sizes!) This was not only the legal and ethical thing to do in order to use the copyrighted name, but it also put our Little Free Library on their map so that people outside our tiny neighborhood know it’s there.
Little Free Libraries come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and designs. My neighborhood’s is a simple blue library, shaped like a little house and boasting only one shelf, but it does the job! (That said, if you’re thinking about starting a Little Free Library and you have the means, I’d say the more shelves, the merrier!) Some Little Free Libraries offer other fun freebies like activity sheets, dog treats, or painted rocks. If ours was larger, I think I’d add puzzles and games to the mix. While scrolling Instagram, I once saw one that offered farm fresh eggs and homemade jam alongside its books! How dreamy!
Stewarding a Little Free Library
Each Little Free Library has a steward who is responsible for its care. They keep it tidy and welcoming. It’s up to the readers to keep the library stocked, but if other Little Free Libraries are anything like the one in my neighborhood, the steward has to span the gap. Stewards have access to several helpful resources on the LFL website.
I aim to check on the library about once a week, but sometimes that looks more like once or twice a month if I’m being honest. My four-year-old loves checking on the library with me, and she’s actually much better about remembering to do it than I am! When I check it, I tidy everything up and assess the state of the collection. If I notice that the collection is shrinking or that certain books haven’t moved in a few months, I know it’s time to refresh and restock.
Stocking the LFL
While selecting books for the Little Free Library, I use a similar thought process as when I’m curating the high school library’s collection, just with an expanded age range. Some of the criteria I consider:
- award winners
- beloved characters
- other high-interest titles (think BookTok, new releases, popular authors and/or series, etc.)
- intriguing premises
- diverse perspectives
- inclusive range of reading levels
- mix of fiction and nonfiction
- multiple languages (something I need to improve with our LFL!)
- good to new condition
And truth be told, covers do matter because no matter what the adage says, people absolutely judge books by their covers, and given how beautiful most covers are these days and how highly visual we are as a smartphone society, I get it.
I do sometimes put books of my own that I’m ready to pass along into the LFL, but mostly I find books at thrift stores and yard sales. Scavenging in thrift stores and yard sales is a little hit or miss, but it’s that much more satisfying when you find the good stuff. To be fair, it’s probably easier for me to find good titles quickly because I handle books during a significant chunk of my working hours. At this point, I can almost immediately recognize popular covers and titles as my eyes scan shelves and stacks of books. That said, there are always so many good books to be found secondhand if you have the time to dig around.
Note: Stewards have access to book giveaways and discounts on the Little Free Library website. I haven’t taken advantage of this yet, but keep that in mind in your hunt for books!
Weeding the LFL
Before I became a librarian, the idea of getting rid of books was hard to stomach. Those of us who love books (I’m assuming you’re one of us if you’re reading this post) feel like it’s an unforgivable sin.
A good library, like a good garden, is weeded regularly. You don’t weed the thriving flowers in a garden; you also don’t weed the books that are circulating well in the library. There are other criteria we in the profession use for determining what to weed (and how to avoid censorship while we’re at it!), but in a nutshell: you need to fill the shelf space with what your patrons will read. The rest needs to go. Sometimes, even great books don’t circulate because their reader isn’t in the vicinity, so they need to be rehomed to give them a chance.
Another factor we consider is the condition of the books. Sure, one person’s trash is another’s treasure, but at a certain point, some books are literally garbage. And just as we don’t want plastic bags blowing through the garden, mussing up the idyllic scene, we don’t want grungy books in a library either. It’s hard enough to get some people to read and we need to remove as many barriers as we can. If a book looks like it will give someone a disease, it’s a goner. If a book is quite literally falling apart, buh-bye.
Weeding could (and maybe one day will be) its own post, but hopefully this gives you a sense of why it matters and the heart behind it.
Common LFL Challenges
- People take the good books and leave behind their reject books that, to put it nicely, others are unlikely to read. Those books sit in the LFL for weeks or months until I finally weed them (more on that later in this post). I always give the reject books a chance, and sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised.
- People take books, but then don’t return them or leave other books, so the overall book selection dwindles. I recently added some bookmark explainers to our Little Free Library to help people understand how it works. I’m hoping that helps with this, but it’s too soon to say.
- People leave random junk, sometimes literal trash. I’ve also heard of Little Free Libraries being vandalized or completely looted (and the books resold by the thieves), but fortunately that hasn’t happened to ours yet. I don’t have a solution for any of these challenges.
LFL & You
What questions do you still have about Little Free Libraries? What’s your experience with them? Do you have one in your neighborhood? What’s the coolest LFL design or non-book offering you’ve encountered?
If you steward a Little Free Library, share some of your best tips and stories with the rest of us! What challenges have you experienced and how did you overcome them?
paige in the library 