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Comment by jmcphers | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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