Little Libraries are a fun and easy way to foster and build community. Well, it’s relatively simple once your community has a Little Library in place.

If your community doesn’t have one, you may be wondering what constitutes a Little Library. A Little Library is a place where community members can exchange books for free. It’s generally a cabinet of some kind that is set up outside, often in a park, on a street corner, in a parking lot, or even in someone’s front yard. Some are fancy (like the one pictured above, located in a park near my house) and some are simple.

Once a Little Library is installed, community members can then drop off or pick up one or two books at a time. Thus, communities can have a free “take a book, return a book” gathering place. In this way, people can share books, ideas, and resources.

This is one of our favorite places to put books that we don’t think we’ll read again, to place an extra copy of a book (for instance, if we’re given a book that we already have), or to pass on a book that we think everyone else should read.

I recently found out that our local community has not one, but three Little Libraries. We’ve borrowed and returned at one of them, which we stumbled upon quite by accident. I look forward to searching out the other two.