RIP Todd Bol, Inventor of ‘Little Free Libraries’ | Hacker News Reader

RIP Todd Bol, Inventor of ‘Little Free Libraries’

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269 pointsokfine33 comments

I built one of these with my kids (5 and 7 at the time), and painted it to look just like our house. I expected it to stand unnoticed in the corner of our driveway as people buzzed past in their SUVs.

That's not at all what happened. People come by -- kids on bicycles, parents with strollers, even elderly folks on a walk. They take and leave books. Sometimes they're people we know, and sometimes they're people we don't. It's a wonderful thing. RIP, Todd.

We love to 'garden' these on our neighborhood walks, sometimes moving books from one that is nearly full to one that is a little bare on books. I've also found classics and some great reads at garage sales on walks for a quarter or 50 cents[1] and bought them and put them into LFL that had a space for it.

[1] I also found the complete 3 volume set of Feynman's lectures on physics at one of those for $5, which I snapped up. Since they wouldn't fit in a little free library I gave them to the High School physics teacher to loan out to students who wanted to go deeper into some of the topics.

Someone once dropped off a piggy bank full of coins in ours with a note that it was a donation to help with the upkeep.

Another time a foreign student took the time to knock on my door, and in broken English, ask permission to use the library even though he didn’t have any books to donate because he had just moved here. I think of the courage that took when I see him now dutifully dropping books off.

Ours is a real pleasure to operate.

Do you have any tips on how to build one and start one up?

Edit: just found this https://littlefreelibrary.org/build/

Also for good ideas, check out Pinterest for little free libraries. I got some neat ideas from there. I ended up building mine around a neat old window I got from a reclaimed housing parts yard. Was really fun to have it in my yard!

There are eight little free libraries within five blocks of our house in Seattle. My 3yo loves them. A fun activity is to walk around the neighborhood, check each library in turn, and discover new books. It's hard to understate how impactful this simple idea has been on my daughter's life and, I hope, on the lives of many others like her. RIP, Todd Bol.

I wonder if you meant "understand" or "overstate" instead of "understate"?

Oops. Good catch. I meant “overstate”. That’s what too little sleep and too much caffeine will lead to, perhaps.

This is such a neat idea. I can see building a Little, Free Library being an interesting project. Add a solar embedded stack [1] to it and you could add some fun features such as: shelf time tracking (maybe to replace never read books), number of checkouts/returns, etc. I'm not sure if adding connectivity would be keeping with the spirit of the project, but it opens up even more interesting social possibilities.

In general, I love the idea of projects/technology that encourage interaction in the physical world. (See the first week or so of Pokémon Go).

[1]: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-build-a-low... is an example of a website run on such a stack

Nice idea! Also, if the books happen to be registered with BookCrossing, they are given a unique ID which you could potentially use for even more social interaction.

There are dozens of these in my neighborhood in Washington DC and they're huge hits. I see people of all backgrounds and languages perusing, sorting, maybe giving the books a quick shuffle. They're generally well-treated and well-respected. There was one that got bashed up a few weeks ago, but it reappeared a few days later, patched up. In general they are well-loved parts of the community, and a reason to have just a little remaining faith in the goodness of humanity. RIP Todd, you did a wonderful thing. (You also gave me a great way to unload my own library, book by book by book over the past few years).

Community-centered spaces like Free Little Libraries have a tremendous impact. They become hubs for knowledge and alliances between neighbors. They foster more resilient communities. Thanks, Todd.

https://littlefreelibrary.org/build/

These are all over Germany, many predating the Little Free Library.

Some of them from the 90s: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_%C3%B6ffentlicher_B%C3%B...

I get the feeling they were around for a lot longer than that, but only the recent ones got listed online.

Wow, that one is cool - made of retired fridges: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_%C3%B6ffentlicher_B%C3%B...

There's a recent interview with Bol here:

http://www.startribune.com/after-cancer-diagnosis-little-fre...

Jesus... that editor's note.

The closing paragraph is especially pertinent:

“I think there’s a bright future for Little Free Library as long as there are books around and the people who love them,” she said. “But there’s no replacing Todd, that’s for sure.”

I never knew the idea was as recent as 2009 - I had naively assumed that they had been around since forever. RIP - he made the world a better place.

The concept isn't that recent.

I've encountered them in various forms throughout the years, but the popularity has ramped up in the last decade as paper books became increasingly obsolete.

Myself as well. They’re all over Berkeley and I assumed they’d been here for some time when I moved here in 2010.

There are two within a short walk of my place. They're pretty cool! On summer evenings there are frequently parents with kids reading on the bench or picking up a book.

This summer I led an ESL class along a street where there was one, and stopped to point it out. A grandmother picked out a book for her granddaughter; I forget whether anyone else picked something out.

My doctor's office has one. My kids love going there and seeing what might be there and adding books.

The idea that someone else put their book there and that they can really gets them excited.

On the one hand, that's cool. Anything that makes a place kids have to go that is often scary and unpleasant nicer is good.

On the other hand...kids aren't always the most hygienic when it comes to handling thing. Is there any concern that sick kids leaving books might spread their sickness? Or are the kind of communicable sicknesses that kids get that send them to the doctor (as opposed to, say, the emergency room) the kind that don't really spread through casual sharing of objects, so it doesn't matter?

I feel like kids are just contagious by default and your typical kid at a clinic has a cold just like the kid in school with a cold.

Despite some outliers, most folks aren't carrying terrible diseases so I don't sweat it.

I've seen these things around Boulder and had no idea it was such a widespread phenomena. The greatest people do things completely unprompted like this. RIP.

We have a few in the city where I live (Belgium). I think it's a quite great idea - the ones I know are located near schools as well which might help children pick up an interesting book.

While I believe the LFL idea originated from an honorable place, we need to do more to support actual libraries and (much more importantly) the staff there who play an important role in public education and assisting patrons in evaluating information:

https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/05/the-case-against-little...

>“As a librarian, my gut reaction to that was, ‘You know what else is a free library? A regular library.’”

I don’t see these taking away from normal libraries in any way. Why is this the reaction?

It reinforces the notion that libraries are just self-service book warehouses, complete ignoring the role that curation plays and ignoring the essential services that a traditional library provides (reference services, interlibrary lending, etc)

Wow, that article is a great way to pour acid on a generous impulse.

I'm pretty sure we can have both...

Not if people keep voting to cut funding to public services. If people see libraries as value-less book warehouses, they're going to be voted out of existence.

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