I was out taking my constitutional the other evening when I noticed a new little free library. There are five of them within just three blocks of my house:

Hmm! I see from the Little Free Library site that about 200,000 of them have been installed around the US since the program began in 2012. People register their sites with them for a fee so they appear on their finder app.

They say that on average one book is borrowed from each library each day, which would be about 70 million a year. That’s a visible percentage of the ~800 million book copies sold each year, and is even a few percent of the ~1.5 billion books lent by the 9,000 public libraries in the country. My town of Arlington may have a lot of LFLs just because it’s especially literate – our own public library hit one million items checked out in FY25, which is ~25 per person in the town.

The site sells kits for them, formerly of wood but now of a more durable composite for about $440. That seems like a lot, and as you can see from the above a lot of people make their own. I especially like the one from George Hart, an old college housemate and now free-lance mathematician and sculptor:

He came to this style through his work on the geometric construction toy the Zometool. It has been used in architecture and is a favorite at Burning Man.

Now, one reason these libraries are popular could be because people are transitioning from paper books to digital ones. Books do occupy a lot of home space, although they do furnish a room. A lot of the items I see in these libraries are old textbooks and school workbooks. Those are entirely digital these days. Yet e-books and audio books are still a small part of the publishing world, accounting for only about 20% of revenue. Print book unit sales continue to rise and had a surge during the pandemic.

Yet books can’t be kept forever, and you hate to just throw them away. Most are still readable, so someone should get some use out of them. It’s not like throwing away a toaster. Books are art, and the purpose of art is to affect the emotions, so it’s no surprise that people have fond feelings for them. They want someone else to enjoy them the way they did.

Another similar service has grown up recently – Little Free Pantries. They contain non-perishable food items where people can take what they need and leave what they don’t:

Same style of hutch, different product. It’s sad that this wealthy country needs these, but here we are. The organization promoting them is much more casual than the LFLs. They appear to be tracking about 2300 of them, and they’re often paired with LFLs.

Let me finish by pointing you to a recent New Yorker cartoon – The Tiny Library of Babel by Adam Douglas Thompson. As in Borges’ original story, books are a road into infinity! Even these small outposts can lead one endlessly on.