Heard it Here

A green and maroon miniature house with a door stands at the corner of Sixth and North Spring Street. Above the door, which is made out of an unfinished frame, a plaque reads: “take a book, return a book.”

This structure is the newest Little Free Library in Winston-Salem. If you open the small door, over 20 books are inside.

This is just one of more than 10 Little Free Libraries in Winston-Salem. Anyone who passes a Little Free Library can take a book and then either return it or replace it with a different one. The structures that hold the books vary in decoration from site to site.

“It is an extension of ourselves,” Richard Groves, the owner of this downtown Little Free Library, said. “I want to get a community of reading going on.” Groves’ Little Free Library is situated in the corner of his front lawn.

Groves put up his Little Free Library on Oct. 6 and placed 20 books inside. A few days later, his neighbor added 14 more books. After just two weeks, eight books have been taken from the box.

The first gone was “Zahir” by Paulo Coelho, a novel about a man searching for his missing wife. Other books that were taken include “A Year by the Sea,” which follows author Joan Anderson as she ventures on a one-year spiritual journey and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” by Kevin Kesey, a story based around characters that live at a mental institution.

Groves’ Little Free Library is just one of over 15,000 in the country. Todd Bol of Hudson, Wis. founded Little Free Library back in 2009. He built a model of a schoolhouse for his mother and filled it with books and put it in his front yard. The positive feedback inspired him to turn it into a project.

The goal of the organization is to promote literacy and create a sense of community. This inspired Sarah Maxey, a Winston-Salem native and graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to start the Little Free Library project in Winston-Salem in 2013.

Maxey created a Kickstarter, an online platform for projects, with the goal of raising $175, but when the fundraising period ended, Maxey had 586 backers and $10,402 had been raised, according to her Kickstarter website. Maxey created some Little Free Library structures and Danielle Tarmey, a Winston-Salem resident, picked up one this past Saturday.

Tarmey, who became interested in the program after seeing a friend’s Facebook post, is in the process of putting up her own Little Free Library. With the help of some neighborhood kids, once it is painted and decorated, she will place it in her front yard on Vintage Avenue, in the Washington park neighborhood, south of downtown.

“I think sharing books has a lot of appeal and creating a community this way … brings people together,” Tarmey said.

Tarmey is currently a sixth-grade teacher and was a fifth-grade teacher prior to that for nine years. One of her favorite things to do was find books for kids. She intends to have a wide variety of books in her Little Free Library.

“It will be a mixture of books … the plan is for it to appeal to a bunch of different reading tastes,” Tarmey said.

Richard Groves made his own Little Free Library, which resembles his current home, a maroon and green Victorian house.

Once a Little Free Library is decorated, an owner decides which books will be put inside.

Groves has over 1,000 books to choose from in his home library, a small number compared to the amount that he used to have in his collection, he said. After retiring as the pastor of Wake Forest Baptist Church, Groves donated 2,000 books to Wingate Hall at Wake Forest University.

After Groves decides on a book, he puts a bookmark inside, which has his address and a photo on it, to remind the reader where the book originally came from.

“They can bring it back or not,” Groves said. “But you have to be ready for your books to not come back.”

Whether or not his books return, the Little Free Library will never be empty.

“By the time we need to refill, maybe we will know what people are taking, fiction or non-fiction,” Groves said. “I want to keep it basically full and as more books leave, I want to replenish it.”