Walking Around Thoughts: Little Library Freedom Ain’t Free

Rufus F.

Rufus is a likeable curmudgeon. He has a PhD in History, sang for a decade in a punk band, and recently moved to NYC after nearly two decades in Canada. He wrote the book "The Paris Bureau" from Dio Press (2021).

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44 Responses

  1. Oscar Gordon says:

    I know what used book stores offer for used books and if someone needs that little bit of money so badly…Report

    • Rufus F. in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

      Yeah, that was my thought- if someone hasn’t been in the situation that this seemed like their best option, their opinion really doesn’t interest me.

      It also reminded me of a neighboring town that passed a law that made it illegal to “steal” from people’s recycling bins- because certain cans fetch a 5 cent deposit.Report

      • Anthony in reply to Rufus F. says:

        Lots of cities do that, because their recycling program depends on capturing those deposits themselves.

        It’s also illegal in a lot of places to “steal” from people’s trash, but that’s actually a nice bit of privacy law.Report

        • Rufus F. in reply to Anthony says:

          I’m not sure exactly how it works here. Usually, you can put the recycling out once a week and get nada, OR if it’s beer cans and beer bottles, you can bring them to the “Beer Store” and get the 20 cents or whatever it is. I suspect it depends on how much you drink or how lazy you are. At any rate, when I walk to work in the morning, I often see the guys with trailers behind their bikes collecting dozens of beer cans. I think it’s still legal in this city to go through the recycling boxes that have been left out. Or, at least, no one seems to care.Report

  2. Chip Daniels says:

    I live near The Last Bookstore here in Los Angeles
    https://www.lastbookstorela.com/
    and in fact, was a major consideration in choosing my location. It is a wonderful place that buys and sells used books, as well as new with art galleries upstairs.
    What is striking when I browse through the store is just how prolific our book industry is, similar to the garment industry.

    Our society produces so many books of so many varieties that a used book has almost no monetary value.
    Some of that the bookstore sells are magnificent coffee table art books in the $20 range, but the bulk of them- pulp novels, history books, literature- are sold for one dollar. Even for good quality used books, they offer the seller maybe five dollars at most since they need to mark them up.

    So yeah, the idea of “book thieves” strikes me as a bit…fanciful.Report

    • Rufus F. in reply to Chip Daniels says:

      That’s what I found fascinating- I would never think to attribute that to anyone. I mean I’ve seen homeless guys take an armful of books and the first thing that goes through my head is, of course, they would have a lot of time to read and it’s a good escape.

      But, running a google search brought up scores of news stories about this apparent worldwide crime wave.Report

  3. My evil use of the Little Free Library would be to dump books I don’t want to take with me next time I move. They are not easy to dispose of.Report

    • I have friends with a bookstore that has new and used sections- probably one in ten of the used books were mine. I was surprised to find they were asked most often about classics, particularly in philosophy. The young people are interested in them and find them hard to come by, and the older ones are looking to recover books they got rid of in various moves!Report

      • Michael Cain in reply to Rufus F. says:

        For experimental purposes, could you identify one such classic for me? Thanks in advance…Report

        • Rufus F. in reply to Michael Cain says:

          Some of them I wasn’t surprised by, like ‘On the Road,’ that remain popular with young people. But, according to my bookstore owning friends, the college students get assigned those collections of excerpts for philosophy courses, but are actually then interested in having the complete book for their library. So, something like Kant’s Critique of Judgment or Hobbes’ Leviathan, ,that I found in cheap copies 20 years ago, they could sell pretty easily. Most of those books, if I want to reread them, I’ll just look on the Internet Archive or Google Books.Report

          • Chip Daniels in reply to Rufus F. says:

            When I was about 10, I actually lived that scene in the Simpsons.

            I found a copy of Wm. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch in my older brother’s bedroom and naturally assumed it was a forbidden delight.

            After a disappointing afternoon of flipping through, I was able to name many more than two things wrong with that title!

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCdM6ss5sloReport

            • Rufus F. in reply to Chip Daniels says:

              It’s funny- thinking back, it was a friend in high school who did a lot of drugs and told me that book would blow my mind or whatever. But I had a big crush on her, so I probably read it thinking it was going to be sexy as well, only to get to… what it is.Report

  4. Rufus F. says:

    I couldn’t figure out where they fit in this, but I did come across two other criticisms of Little Free Libraries: 1. On occasion, neo-nazis have filled them with their literature, which seems pretty easily rectified, and 2. A few people associate them with gentrification- if you see a new one in a low-income area, rents will go up soon. To my mind, this seems to come from the same depressing notion that poor people don’t want to read. At the least, surely stronger rent control laws would work better than denying certain neighborhoods cultural amenities.Report

    • Slade the Leveller in reply to Rufus F. says:

      I live in an area that’s solidly middle, probably even lower middle, class, and I can think of 2 within a couple minutes’ walk. Books know no class.Report

  5. CJColucci says:

    As far as I can tell, the cops aren’t going after little library “thieves” and no one is proposing prosecuting them. My guess, though I’ll defer to Minnesota criminal lawyers, is that emptying out a little library and making a few pitiful bucks selling the contents is not a crime.What happened here is that the local cops donated a bunch of books to the (probably legally) despoiled little libraries.

    This was a nice thing to do.

    Do people have so little going on in their own lives that twitter mobs have to jump on something like this?Report

  6. Dark Matter says:

    I was at the University of Michigan decades ago when some group, to much fan fair, unleashed “green bikes” on the world. Stripped of the happy talk they were unowned community bikes.

    They instantly disappeared. I’m not sure what happened, taken into private ownership and/or sold for scrap metal maybe.Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to Dark Matter says:

      My school did something similar (red bikes), and if it wasn’t bikes vanishing, it was complaints of the bikes being left helter skelter across sidewalks, parking lots, and driveways.Report

    • Rufus F. in reply to Dark Matter says:

      This is exactly what would happen here. It’s another topic I’d like to learn more about- we have a large bike-riding indigent population in this city, and it’s extremely hard to own a bike and not have it stolen, even with good locks. As far as I can tell, you pretty much have to bring them into buildings with you. But you constantly hear stories about bike theives and stolen bikes.

      We do have community bikes that you rent with your credit card and that seems to work better- I guess they must have gps. The problem there was they were “sponsored” by Uber, the world’s largest Ponzi scheme, who backed out, and then they had to scramble to find support- which is weird because you do rent the bikes.

      Anyway, there’s probably a book there. But bike thieves are already the subject of one of the all-time great movies:
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2P4xo9kmPMReport

    • Chip Daniels in reply to Dark Matter says:

      I wonder if someone could contact those bicycle thieves and ask them to apply their expertise to all those scooters I keep tripping over on our sidewalks.

      I would be willing to give them some sort of bounty for the service.Report

  7. InMD says:

    Interesting thought on whether private property societies struggle with the idea of communal property. It seems to me that for communal property to work the way it’s supposed to there also needs to be a very strong sense of communal responsibility. Obviously the stakes are incredibly low with the little free library. But anyone whose ever had that roommate that left the bathroom in a horrific state knows how it can play out. I can only imagine sharing something like a car. If everyone is responsible then no one is responsible.

    One thing I’ve come to believe is that Western society, and American society in particular, puts a lot of value in defection and freedom to defect. There are times that actually works really well for us. It also means that there are some nice things we just can’t have.Report

    • Rufus F. in reply to InMD says:

      “One thing I’ve come to believe is that Western society, and American society in particular, puts a lot of value in defection and freedom to defect. There are times that actually works really well for us. It also means that there are some nice things we just can’t have.”

      This is an interesting point. America does seem to put a stronger emphasis on that value. Remember that Canada was founded to a large extent by United Empire Loyalists, who defined themselves by *not* defecting. I’ve noticed a somewhat stronger emphasis on social cohesion. But people here also tend to take a live and let live attitude that allows for a decent amount of internal defection.

      But all societies have subgroups that aren’t quite assimilable. I wonder how Little Free Libraries would work in say, Bulgaria. Would the locals assume the Romany were stealing books?

      I suppose the problem societies will run into is when it becomes increasingly unclear how one would buy in, if they wanted to. I can say it was certainly clearer to my grandparents than it is to me.Report

    • Philip H in reply to InMD says:

      Interesting thought on whether private property societies struggle with the idea of communal property. It seems to me that for communal property to work the way it’s supposed to there also needs to be a very strong sense of communal responsibility.

      Welcome to EVERY debate about the Tragedy of the Commons in natural resource management and protection.Report

  8. Brandon Berg says:

    My understanding, based on perusing the Little Free Library web site, is that the idea is that people donate books in order to give people who can’t easily afford books access to free books to read. The whole thing is premised on the idea that poor people do like to read.

    If what actually happens is that one person grabs all the books, carts them off to a used book store—dumping the unsellable ones in the trash—and now people who actually want to read them have to pay at a considerable markup, this goal is frustrated. If the donors had wanted to sell the books to a used book store and give the money to charity, they would have done that.

    But I don’t know. I guess if people are just using them as dumping grounds for books they don’t want, it doesn’t matter.

    Regardless, the real moral of the story, as always, is that Twitter Trash are the worst.Report

    • Rufus F. in reply to Brandon Berg says:

      Yeah, definitely. In case it’s not clear from my post, I think the Little Free Library organization is a pure good for humanity and I’m glad they exist and that people pass along books. I also think there are random individuals who don’t fully grasp the concept, which strikes me as amusing and interesting.

      As for the worst dregs of Twitter… well, I certainly agree on that point!Report

  9. Jaybird says:

    I am often struck by how creative people can be in attributing spiritual qualities to others based on purely aesthetic criteria.

    If I wanted to make a moral judgment and the only information I had was aesthetic, I’d probably lean pretty heavily on stuff like individual choices for how one presents oneself inbetween denials of physiognomy being real.

    Sigh.

    Collective action is a bear, though. Especially when nobody knows each other anymore.Report

    • Rufus F. in reply to Jaybird says:

      Absolutely. I sort of wonder if religious people can manage it easier because they assume that God knows you, even if they don’t. (Of course, the issue there is they’re always trying to complete the sale.)Report

    • Dark Matter in reply to Jaybird says:

      If I wanted to make a moral judgment and the only information I had was aesthetic…

      Moral judgements about the poor is a problem because it makes it harder to not be poor.

      It’s also a problem because there’s a HARD nugget of truth in there. Dysfunctional behavior (addiction, mental illness, bad cultural habits) tend to make you poor.Report

      • Rufus F. in reply to Dark Matter says:

        Or keep you poor anyway. Many people who are born poor will die poor, and certainly part of that is their having learned to play the role. Some of that might be watching their parents, but I have a feeling that, even with the ideal role models, it’s still hard to escape internalized classism. I see it in myself- a tendency towards a type of fatalism and projected insecurity that I try to ward off as much as possible, because it’s no good for getting things done!Report

        • Jaybird in reply to Rufus F. says:

          Oh, there was a book that came out a while back that talked about this.

          Each class has a system of rewards for staying and punishments for trying to leave. (And “leaving” was defined as “acting like you were from a different one”.)

          It’s rewarding to stay where you are. And you’ll be punished if you try to change.Report

        • Chip Daniels in reply to Rufus F. says:

          One of the things that wealth purchases is the freedom to risk and fail without consequence and make decisions that, only in hindsight, are good decisions.

          We all know the stories of the plucky and clever inventors tinkering in their garage (while being supported by the hard work of others), making shrewd and wise decisions which resulted in success.
          Less known are the million others whose tinkering resulted in failure, or the millions who were not able to risk because they needed to husband their resources.

          “Good decisions” are often only “good” because they were combined with luck- of being in the right place at the right time or having the right social connections.

          There are probably millions of people out there who squandered the family savings on an online bookselling platform, or point and click user interface, or whatever, but because the venture failed, their decision and resultant poverty is looked at as an example of foolish spendthiftery.
          On the converse, people who in the 1990s made the good decision to pay the rent and contribute to their retirement account, rather than invest in some foolish startup called Amazon.

          Our view of success is often warped by some sort of survivor bias; We assume that good and bad decisions are obvious when they never really are, and maybe we prefer to ignore the frightening thought of just how much of our lives is determined by random chance.Report

          • Dark Matter in reply to Chip Daniels says:

            You’re drastically over valuing “random chance”. Yes, to be Bill Gates everything has to go right, this includes a lot of luck. However part of that “everything” is not doing stupid things or self destructive things and a huge amount of risk and work.

            Much more importantly, it is possible, even easy, to be successful without winning a start-up lottery. My eldest didn’t just wake up one morning and find she’d accidently become a software engineer with a great job.

            I’m one of the millions of people who failed to make his start up work. I lost a lot of money doing so. For two years I was technically poor, I’m not now. I just work for Fortune 500s nowdays.Report

            • Rufus F. in reply to Dark Matter says:

              I would say most of us are much more willing to assign random chance to the setbacks in our lives than the things that went right.

              I would say another factor that gets overlooked is sheer chutzpah. I’ve known plenty of poor creative types with great ideas who needed to be kicked in the butt to share those ideas with others. It was really hard to explain “fake it ’till you make it” to a few of my friends for example.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Rufus F. says:

                I would say most of us are much more willing to assign random chance to the setbacks in our lives than the things that went right.

                To get a job from any specific interview requires a fair amount of luck.

                If you can keep going on interviews until you get a job? That’s not luck.Report

              • Rufus F. in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Like I said, at a certain point, sheer chutzpah helps a lot. There’s an essay where Kurt Vonnegut talks about teaching creative writing and says that every class has a few who could be professional writers, but most won’t, and the ones who do are just insistent that everyone has to read their work, even if nobody wants to at the moment.Report

            • Chip Daniels in reply to Dark Matter says:

              What percentage of the outcome of our life is skill versus luck? I don’t suppose there is any way to know, really.

              But in the same way that the ancient philosophers would advice to “memento mori” or that “All glory is fleeting”, its good for us to keep in mind our own mortality and frailty.

              You and I and everyone here is much much closer to the guy sleeping in a doorway than we are to a Jeff Bezos and I mean, a LOT closer, like most everyone would be stunned to realize how precarious our hold on our world is.Report

              • Rufus F. in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Like I said, sheer chutzpah plays a bigger role than we think. I remember a musician once being asked how his band “made it” in music and he said: Well, we just didn’t stop. If we stopped touring around playing music, my only other skill is delivering pizzas, so we just never stopped.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Rufus F. says:

                I still remember a sermon given back in the 1980’s by my Southern Babtist minister. Well, not the sermon, per se. The poem he read in the middle of the sermon.

                KEEP KICKING
                Two gay young frogs from inland bogs,
                Had spent their night in drinking.
                As morning broke and they awoke,
                While still their eyes were blinking,
                A farmer’s pall came to the swale,
                And caught them quick as winking.

                ‘Ere they could gather scattered senses,
                Or breathe a prayer for past offenses,
                That granger grand, that guiltless man,
                Had dumped them in the milkman’s can.

                They quickly find their breath will stop
                Unless they swim upon the top.
                They swim for life, they kick and swim
                Until their weary eyes grow dim.

                Their muscles ache, their breath grows short,
                And gasping, speaks one weary sport,
                “Say, old dear, I’ve had enough of life, no more
                I’ll try it. Sweet milk is not my diet.”

                “Tut tut, my lad,” the other cries,
                A frog’s not dead until he dies.
                Let’s keep on kicking, that’s my plan.
                We yet may see outside this can.”

                “No use, no use,” faint heart replies.,
                Turns up his toes and gently dies.
                Now the brave frog, undaunted still,
                Kept kicking with a right good will,
                Until with joy too great to utter
                He found he’s churned a pound of butter.
                And climbing upon this hunk of grease,
                He floated to town with greatest ease.

                Now the moral to the story is this:
                When in your Christian life you find
                You’re weary of the toilsome grind,
                Don’t get discouraged and go down,
                But struggle on, no murmur utter,
                A few more kicks may bring the butter.

                Now, of course, “moral luck” is one of the hardest pills to swallow and it’s one that we all need to.

                But.

                I have had friends who gave up early. I have had friends who kept at it no matter what.

                And some of the friends who tended to give up early did well. And not every friend who kept at it no matter what got his due.

                But, all things being equal, the group of friends who kept at it no matter what got further than the ones who tended to give up early.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird says:

                As with the novel “Naked Lunch”, a Baptist sermon that begins with “Two gay young frogs” didn’t live up to its initial promise.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                You and I and everyone here is much much closer to the guy sleeping in a doorway than we are to a Jeff Bezos

                For me to be Bezos would have happened if my company had worked.

                If we’d stumbled on a solid trading algo (i.e. if the research had been successful) we would have had a license to print money. Or alternatively, if we’d started two-three years earlier with our existing strats.

                For me to be sleeping in a doorway requires me to be someone else. Me-but-insane would do it. I’m not sure to what degree serious addiction would do it because that requires me to not do anything to fix myself.

                This year I’ve lost my job again. This year I’ve had to go interviewing. The first several times I interviewed didn’t go well. I had to re-invent my skills yet again.

                There are certainly elements of luck to all this, however there are also large amounts of “successful behavior creates success at some point”.

                Luck plays a huge roll in who specifically gets Covid. Taking the vaccine is not luck and helps a lot.Report

              • Rufus F. in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                In regards to what Chip said before about most of us being closer to sleeping in doorways than we realize, I think of something my former father-in-law said. My ex had some fairly severe mental illnesses, but she was also born to wealthy parents and got very good care. It probably could have gone either way. I remember her father, who was a CFO at Deloitte, giving generously to panhandlers, and when I said something about it, saying “That could have easily been my daughter, if she had a different family.”Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Rufus F. says:

                That’s basically my ex-sister-in-law too. IMHO without other people’s money she’d be homeless because she’s not functional enough to have a job.

                I’ve known a few others like that over the years. Some got a bad roll of the genetic dice, some picked their parents poorly and imho were abused into mental illness. A few fried their minds on some substance.

                IMHO they had reduced odds of life success and increased odds of homelessness.

                That implies the reverse too, that you play some role in your successes.Report

              • Rufus F. in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Yeah… there’s the other thing too though, where people are functional themselves, but wind up adjacent to someone who goes off the rails.

                I think we’ve all had a small version of that where a friend or lover changes so drastically that we have to ditch them to keep our own sanity. It’s sort of unavoidable sometimes.

                Now, imagine it’s someone you’re living with or a parent or even a spouse… I’ve met more than a few people who fled abusive relationships because they had to choose survival over shelter.

                In my own case, it wasn’t far from that. The only advantage was I saw it coming well enough in advance that I made friends who had couches to sleep on, and found a few shit-jobs to get my footing. But, staying in that situation was NOT an option.

                I mean, maybe it *was* a bad decision to marry and move to Canada, but all I can say is the person I was with for seven years was not the person I had to leave at 1 a.m. in a snowstorm.

                So, I don’t know- having friends you can call in an emergency is a godsend, and hopefully I’ve been the same for a few people.Report