20 May A Little Free Library in Diligent River

Thursday evening, I drove to an event 12 kilometres west of Parrsboro along the Bay of Fundy shore, one of the great drives of Nova Scotia. In the village of Diligent River, this structure stopped me cold:

Leave a book, take a book is the idea.

As I’ve since learned, Little Public Libraries are a thing, pioneered seven years ago by Todd Bol of Hudson, Wisconsin, who built the first one in the shape of a one-room schoolhouse as a tribute to his mother, a teacher who liked to read.

Bol made a few more for friends, and the idea spread like a Fort Mac fire in the age of climate change. Bt the start of this year, there were 36,000 registered Little Free Libraries in Canada and the US, including about a dozen in Nova Scotia. Many more are unregistered, like the one I stumbled upon in Diligent River.

Turns out the Little Free Libraries didn’t just facilitate reading, they also shored up the sense of community in rural hamlets and urban neighbourhoods.

“I didn’t expect to meet people,” Nicole MacDonald of Higgins St. in Truro told Chronicle-Herald freelancer Jennifer Taplin in 2013, after her husband built an LFL.

“They frequently knock on her door to ask her about the little library in her front yard,” Taplin reported. “A man brought to her attention a book he found in there called How to Build a Flying Saucer. A four-year-old boy left a thank-you note, and she was invited to [a neighbour’s] house for tea.”

As of yet, there are no registered Little Free Libraries in Cape Breton, but we’ll fix that this summer.