It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.
― Oscar Wilde

In walking in my new neighborhood in San Francisco, I got to notice something interesting in front of a couple of houses: small tiny houses! Too big to be bird houses and almost the size of doll houses. The second interesting fact of these houses: they have books in it, protected by a glass or plastic door. The third and final interesting element, they all have the same inscription: take a book, leave a book (as in the picture below).

As it turns out, this is part of a larger movement with tens of thousands of small libraries across the globe. It would appear that the example below follow the idea behind this movement but is not “officially” part of the Not-for-Profit Organization the Little Free Library, whose logo is displayed on the right. On the organization site, you can access a map of all registered libraries. While most are in the USA and Canada, there are quite a few in Italy and some in other European countries.

I even recently learn that one of my colleagues in Toronto built his own free library and registered it, which gives you a small plaque to put on your library and an entry on the world map as part of the benefit of doing this step. I further found out that there is one officially registered little free library in Quebec City (my hometown)…

I find the idea compelling and will put this on my bucket list for when this sabbatical is over!