Little Free Library

I watched my husband Bo paint the purple letters on the yellow header above the plexiglass door of my new free library. Visions of spines with names like Maya Angelou, Aldo Leopold, Salman Rushdie, and J.D. Salinger danced in my head. The neighbors up and down Devil Fork Road were going to love it — and I could create my own literary community.

It was the fall of 2023, and I’d been inspired to launch the project a couple of months earlier when I’d flown to the Finger Lakes to visit my retired librarian friend, Janet.

“Oh look, there’s someone at the little free library,” Janet had said as we pulled up in front of her place. A young woman in a sundress was standing pensively at what looked like an elevated wooden dollhouse where Janet’s driveway departed from the country road. “I wonder if they will leave us something exciting.”

After the patron drove away, I walked 15 paces from Janet’s front door and opened the library. Richard Powers’ Pulitzer-prize-winning The Overstory and Bewilderment were there along with Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree. Eat Pray Love and The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert joined The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. There was even a section for kids, featuring Dr. Seuss’ Oh, the Places You’ll Go, Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

Having been an actual librarian, Janet was obviously the consummate curator. She said she enjoyed keeping the shelves stocked with a balance of education and entertainment, and her favorite visitors were the UPS delivery man and a 4-year-old who’d left a thank-you card.

I fantasized about creating my own little free library for the largely unseen people of my tiny community, Flag Pond. When Bo picked me up at the Asheville airport, I shared my idea on the drive home. He was skeptical.

“Janet lives in upstate New York near an Ivy League school. We are in the remotest corner of East Tennessee. People who drive by here probably aren’t looking for books.”

I could tell he was trying to protect me from disappointment. I agreed that perhaps our neighbors were more familiar with Winchesters than Wuthering Heights and knew more about oxycontin than O. Henry. But I was determined.

It took Bo a half-day to build and another half-day to paint the cutest free library ever, a merry green cabinet with bright yellow highlights. Two main shelves and a third smaller, recessed rack at the top would hold about 50 books. On day three, he installed the well-appointed structure, topped by a corrugated roof, on a sturdy post at the bottom of our 400-yard gravel driveway. It was near a line of mailboxes, visible from the two-lane country road, and afforded ample space to park, browse, and turn around.

The launch titles included battered classics like The Catcher in the Rye, 1984, and Slaughterhouse Five, an aged T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence pair that had been together through many moves, duplicate copies people had gifted me of The Nature Principle, Last Child in the Woods, and The Hidden Life of Trees. Bo donated volumes on the nature, cultural history, and geography of Southern Appalachia. Capping the offering were assorted cookbooks; extra field guides to birds, butterflies, moths, fishes, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians; random poetry collections; and a weathered Norton Anthology of English Literature.

Once I’d stocked the shelves, panic set in. What if someone shoots it? I thought with dread.

From the library, our driveway travels up the holler to our locust-log gate, zigs left to run along a line of white pines, then zags right to reach our cabin. There is no way to see the library from our house, even with my Zeiss binoculars. I put my hand on our new little creation, as if comforting a child who would have to stay alone overnight in the hospital.

The next morning, I raced down to the library — and all was well. No one had touched it. In fact, no one touched it for a week. Then two. Bo graciously withheld the anticipated I-told-you-so look.

“These people are like wildlife,” I mused. “They’re naturally suspicious of anything new.”

I’d grown up in eastern Kentucky in a small community not unlike Flag Pond. Outsiders and new ideas were not readily accepted by the locals. I’d lived here less than a decade and my job was in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which meant my social life was centered two hours away. I wanted to get to know people here — and I saw the library as a means to help me do that.

Maybe all the library needed was a friendly touch. I looked through my unused notebooks and found a beautiful journal with a gold-embossed leopard on the cover. I’d never used it because the cat depicted wasn’t native to Appalachia. This would make a good logbook.

Welcome to the free library. Leave a legible note and I’ll write you back.

Below this message on the opening page, I signed my name. And I waited. Working mostly from home, I didn’t go to the library every day. But each time I passed it, nothing looked to have been disturbed. Sometimes I checked the logbook and found nada, zip, zilch. I went about my business and assumed the library would never be accepted.

Then one day, I glanced over at it in passing and was shocked. Half the books were gone — including the gold-embossed leopard logbook that was going to be a permanent record of visitors and how much they loved the library. Angrily, I scrounged a crumpled sticky-note pad from my purse, scribbled some words, and stuck the message on the inside of the library door facing out:

Please: Take ONE book. Leave ONE book.

On the remainder of the notepad, I duplicated my earlier welcome message and tossed it onto the small top shelf.

Frustrated, that night I texted local friends of Bo’s asking them to save any unwanted books for me. At a Christmas party, a woman handed me a grocery bag.

“These are for your library,” she said looking like she’d done the world a huge favor. Inside I found several Dashiell Hammets, Dan Browns, Stephen Kings, and John Grishams. I thanked her profusely.

By New Year’s, the library’s plexiglass door looked like a giant rectangular snowflake, frozen in an extreme cold snap. I gave the library only a cursory glance when I came and went. I gave the library a snowball’s chance in hell of making it here.

And then, as spring began to stir in the mountains, one day I came down the driveway to find the library positively crammed. New books were haphazardly heaped in behind the ones already on the shelves. I had to take them all out to organize them, keeping the overflow to take to Bo’s shed. Most of the authors’ names were ones I didn’t recognize. I took a sticky note from my purse and left a new message on the door, adding a heart and a smiley face to preserve an air of friendliness.

Please do not overload the library.

My message was received, apparently. Instead of filling the library to the gills, the next drive-by book off-loader left a whole box of titles on the damp gravel under the library, much as a skulking new mother would leave an illegitimate infant on a dowager’s doorstep.

Please do not leave entire boxes of books below the library, especially when it’s been raining!

Some of the books were poorly written or about topics I would not want to endorse. I started selecting a lucky title to burn each weekend at our campfire behind the house.

By summer, it had been a year since I’d seen Janet’s model library. I was harboring a cabinet of mediocre literature, and one side of Bo’s shed was overflowing with books we didn’t even like. I’d long since given up trying to curate the material.

Then, at the end of September, Hurricane Helene devasted not only Asheville, which is what most remember, but also Erwin, Tennessee, the nearby town that provided jobs to many folks living along Devil Fork Road. It took several days before we got out to see the Nolichucky River altered forever by the flood that claimed six lives at a plastics factory and hundreds of riverside homesteads.

That was the day I returned home to find the library smelling sugary and crawling with ants. Someone had left sticky pieces of wrapped candy on every shelf. This was the last straw.

Please do not leave food in the library! It attracts ANTS!

After leaving this note, I drove to the house for cleaning supplies. What did these people want from me? I’d tried to provide a wonderful literary experience, but instead I’d created a dumping ground for low-grade smut and become a glorified babysitter for people too irresponsible to follow simple directions.

“You were right,” I whined to Bo. “My library was not such a great idea.”

I returned to the scene of the crime and began tossing books into my car. First the bottom shelf with its usual mystery fare and hardback political propaganda, then the upper shelf of vapid paperback romances. Suddenly, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking leapt into my hands followed by several other titles on grief. Daily meditations and spiritual self-help volumes appeared flanking Melody Beattie’s The Language of Letting Go. What was going on here?

Tucked away under a King James version of the New Testament on the upper ledge was the crumpled sticky-note pad I’d thrown in there the day I’d found my leopard journal taken. To my dismay, there on its yellow pages, the people for whom I’d created the library sprang to life.

“Hi. Thank you for the library. P.S. Have a good day.” ~Kyriana

“Thanks for making the little free library! I’ll keep stopping by and participating.” ~Heather

“Got Chicken Soup for a Woman’s Soul and a devotional for an elderly flood victim.” ~Michelle

“Thank you for building this! It’s so sweet!” ~Olivia, neighbor by Sweetwater Church

Scattered between everyone else’s notes were dated entries from Tony, who loved having a library near home because his bike was his only form of transportation. Tony always took several books and returned them within a couple weeks. The log showed he was currently reading A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini and Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose. Bo later told me that Tony has a history of drug abuse, hence no driver’s license, but he’s clean now. And, apparently, an avid reader.

A few weeks ago, Bo met a couple who had just moved to Flag Pond from upstate New York.

“Where do y’all live,” he inquired.

“You know where the free library is?” The man asked, not knowing he was speaking to its architect. “We’re about a mile up the road from there.”

I have never seen anyone at the little free library. But since Helene, I’ve stopped referring to it as mine. There seems to be a core group of curators collaborating to offer a buffet of choices, a balance of education and entertainment. Bo’s shed still holds an overflow, and I still burn an occasional title just … I don’t know, to prove a point to the universe, I guess. But I now see the free library as a conversation between me and the people who live around me. It continually teaches me to meet my community on its own terms, to observe in wonder as they shape their own literary world and offer healing, through books, to their neighbors. Though I didn’t know it at first, I now understand: That’s what I was seeking all along.

 

Copyright © 2026 by Frances Figart. All rights reserved.