A creative journey of self-discovery using discarded books and found objects.
The son of a Wisconsin schoolteacher, Todd Bol was well into his fifties when he dreamt up the first Little Free Library, not expecting that tens of thousands of these tiny shrines to the love of reading would sprout around the world to outlive him.
I was visiting a friend on the other side of the continent when I encountered a Little Free Library for the first time. I fell in love instantly. Years passed. I kept thinking about it. As soon as I moved into my Brooklyn home in the autumn of 2018, I put one up in front of my house, painted it yellow, and left a few well-loved books inside.
That week, Todd Bol died.
In the years since, in our community of artists and low-income families with kids, nowhere near a bookstore, with only an understocked and overrun public library branch to suffice, I have watched my Little Free Library bustle with books given and taken, spanning the entire spectrum of genres, eras, and sensibilities.
One day during a challenging season of being, longing for something that would turn my spiraling mind outward, knowing that a daily creative practice has always been my best medicine and that constraint is the mightiest catalyst of creativity, I decided to try applying my bird divination process to the Little Free Library, trusting the lovely way our imagination has of surprising us and, in doing so, reminding us that even in the bleakest moments it is worth turning the page of experience because the imagination of life is always greater than that of the living.
Every day for thirty days, I took a random book from the Little Free Library, opened to a random page, and worked with the text on it, making no aesthetic judgments about the literary value of the books — self-help, airport romance novels, finance textbooks, breastfeeding guides, Lemony Snicket, Tolstoy, Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and the Bible were all raw material on equal par.
As every creative person knows, and as Lewis Carroll so perfectly articulated in his advice on working through difficulty in math and in life, our most original and unexpected ideas arrive not when we strain the mind at the problem, but when we relax it and shift the beam of attention to something else entirely; it is then that the unconscious shines its sidewise gleam on an unexpected solution no deliberate effort could have produced.
After reading over the page, I would take a long walk to let the words float in my mind as I knelt to look at small things — pebbles, petals, leaves, feathers, and a whole lot of that great teacher in resilience, lichen — picking one thing up to take home. The words invariably arranged themselves unconsciously into the day’s… divination? koan? poem?… that always surprised me, always revealed what I myself needed to hear that some part of me already knew.
Upon returning home, I would place the found object under my microscope and take a photograph — cellular and planetary at the same time, itself an invitation to a shift in perspective — then begin laying out the text over the image.
Here they all are — perhaps uncommon gifts for the book-lover in your life, perhaps simply inspiration to try the practice yourself — available as translucent 4×4 blocks with proceeds supporting my endeavor to put up Little Free Libraries in book deserts throughout the five boroughs of New York City — communities more than a mile from a public library or bookstore.
Key Points
- The concept of Little Free Libraries promotes community sharing of books.
- The author utilized a creative practice to explore personal insights.
- Found objects and random texts served as tools for self-discovery.
Sources: The Marginalian
