We went on a scavenger hunt to find every little library in Waite Park
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Robert Doze admits he was skeptical when his wife Judith proposed building a Little Free Library — did they really need the clutter in their front yard?
A few years later, the popularity of their curbside box has made him a believer. He’s even thinking about adding a lower level for younger readers.
“It’s been a good conversational thing — for people you know and people you don’t know,” Doze said of their blue-and-white box on McKinley Street.
The Dozes are part of a global movement that started a little over a decade ago in Hudson, Wisconsin. Todd Bol built the first book-sharing cubby, shaped like a one-room schoolhouse, and put it on a post in his front yard.
Little Free Library incorporated as a nonprofit in 2010 and now boasts more than 100,000 registered libraries in more than 100 countries worldwide, with a mission of building community, inspiring readers, and expanding book access.
In the Waite Park neighborhood, curious readers can find at least 20 of the boxes, not counting the similar ones that have sprung up to share food or art supplies. The libraries’ contents range from cookbooks and religious texts to mass market paperbacks and critically acclaimed hardcovers.
“It’s been fun to see what shows up,” said Elizabeth Zaccardi, who inherited a rustic-themed Little Free Library when she and her husband Tony bought their home on the 3100 block of Lincoln Street. On a recent weekend, the lopsided pile of books in their box included children’s picture books, parenting guides, the second Chronicles of Narnia book, and a David Sedaris collection.
“It’s been fun to see what shows up.”
The libraries’ designs are as varied as the media they contain. Greg Flanagan said it was his 7-year-old daughter’s idea to make their library on the corner of 31st and Hayes look like King Friday XIII’s castle from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.
“The design is fun. If people notice what it is, they comment,” Flanagan said.
He and his wife collect a lot of books and tend to share more than they take, but their daughter finds a steady stream of children’s books to read and return. And for all three of them it’s been a way to meet from their front yard.
“I think it adds to getting to know your neighbors,” Flanagan said.
The small spaces have evolved to take on new uses and missions in recent years. At the start of the coronavirus pandemic last spring, for example, some began to use the boxes as a place to share non-perishable food.
Michelle Filkins has had her library on the corner of 32nd and Cleveland for about seven years. She recently began participating in a Little Free Library program called Read in Color, a new initiative to bring diverse books to its book-sharing boxes. With support from the nonprofit, Filkins is working to stock her library with diverse authors, but the community is contributing as well.
“I’ve been happy to find that not only are people putting in engineering textbooks from 1980 or whatever they found in the garage in a musty box, but they’re also putting in new titles, often by diverse authors,” Filkins said. “It suggests to me that people are buying into the idea that we really should try to read outside of our own lived experience.”
—Photos and words by Dan Haugen
