Here’s our story of setting  up a Little Free Library (LFL) at our home in Springfield, Missouri. — DRAFT —

Backstory: In mid-2021, I had a major health scare. My wife and I had been separated for several years, but Kary stepped up. After my condition deteriorated, she moved me from northern California to her home in Springfield, Missouri (where I spent more days & nights at Cox hospital than home).

In January 2022,  I was referred for hospice care. But thankfully, Kary questioned the preliminary diagnoses, and struggled to move me to BJC Hospital in St. Louis, where I  was diagnosed with #neurosarcoidosis and treated. I’ve recovered, but with some disabilities.

During the past three years, my personal library regrew from a couple hundred (mostly poetry) to several thousand (mostly mystery, science-fiction, and nonfiction).

I had read about and visited a few Little Free Libraries, and wanted to place one in our community. In 2022-23, we purchased the home that Kary had rented in the northeast corner of Springfield.

I might not have made much progress with our LFL (or with my recovery), without Kary’s persistent support and encouragement.

While I love the smaller 1- and 2-shelf LFLs I’ve visited, I wanted “more,” and eventually I identified some taller “garden sheds” that seemed more ideal. Kary surprised me by simply ordering the kit from Amazon.

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While visiting for Riley’s college graduation in May, Kary’s ex-husband Carlos assembled the shed. He and our houseguest Sam also stained, sealed, and caulked the shed. Kary arranged for another community member to prepare and install a brick support and pathway in our front yard. Be aware: this was many hours of labor (my disabilities limited my own labor).

We modified the shed to add full-width shelves (by default, the shelves are half-width, to leave room for larger tools like rakes and shovels). We bought shelves from the clearance section at a building-supply store (Menard’s).

We’ve always loved “Friends of the Library” book sales, and I seized the local opportunity to buy several hundred books, including many kids’ books, at the final-day “bag sale.” (I also bought a couple hundred mystery novels at 25¢ each from a bookstore-closing sale in Joplin.)

Since opening our LFL in August, we’ve had a modest number of visitors.

I’ve added some notes to the inside of the door:

You do not need to return books; you can keep them, share them with anyone, or return them to any Little Free Library.

Please place donated books in the top compartment (or on our front porch).

Note: we may exchange or donate  books  to other LFLs in the region.

Some issues:

Bulk takers? We’re giving away books for free, but we heard from other LFL stewards that some people “raid” LFLs and take “many or all” of the books. We think these people are reselling the books for profit (though some might just be book “hoarders”).

The simplest solution to block resellers is to mark or stamp the books so that a used-book shop won’t buy them. We ordered a custom self-inking stamp, which I use to mark the first and last inside pages, and the bottom edge of each book. For some children’s book with slick pages, and board books, we place a label over the back-cover bar code.

One afternoon, I watched from inside our house as someone drove up to our LFL and hopped out of their car. They opened the LFL door, immediately grabbed a book, glanced at it, then  put it back and closed the door — all within ten seconds. That’s not enough time even to read the titles of a few book spines. When they drove off, I suspected they’d simply checked that our LFL books were “stamped” and thus could not easily be resold.

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