Flaneusing Around Toronto's Little Free Libraries

The publisher sent me four boxes of books when it folded. What else could I do?

On a lovely warm fall day, I set out on a walk with my friend Alicia to take a tour of Little Free Libraries in her neighbourhood. With intent. In our backpacks were copies of two of my books from a publisher that had gone belly-up, hmmm, more than a dozen years before. At the time, Key Porter had sent a letter offering to ship me the remaining copies of the two titles in their warehouse: my novel Drink the Sky and memoir Foreign Correspondences, A Traveler’s Tales. 

Naively, I agreed, and four boxes of books thudded onto the front porch. Having no idea what to do with eighty books, I put them in the basement. If they had mouldered there, that would have been that. But our basement is dry. No mouldering. Pristine copies. And now it was time to distribute them to readers, not least because of the Swedish death purge I’ve begun this fall. 

I’m half Swedish, and as a recent book explains, Swedes have a decluttering process they do routinely as they age, which is generally defined as being over fifty. (I’m a late bloomer.) You declutter your house so you don’t burden the next generation with your mess. The death purge—döstädning—is far less sentimental than Marie Kondo’s gentle shedding. No holding things in your hand to spark joy. Just get rid of the bloody stuff. 

There’s a Little Free Library on our street that’s very well-used, and a while ago it occurred to me to open a Key Porter box to slip in one of my books for some random reader to find. I did it furtively, glancing over my shoulder as if I was doing something weird, which I was. But the book was gone quickly, and so were the ones I put into a couple of other Little Libraries, and I ended up leaving several copies in Hamilton when I drove there to visit a friend.

Then there was the time I passed a Little Free Library when out with another friend. I opened it and put in one of the novels that, by then, I was keeping in my backpack.

My friend pulled out a book and looked thoughtfully at the author’s name. “I went out with him for a year and a half,” she said. “In my late twenties, early thirties.” Really? We hadn’t known each other then. But I’d met the guy (name redacted) and said he’d struck me as intense. 

“Up and down and all over the map,” she said. “Unpredictable. Difficult.” 

So—a young writer. We both laughed.

“I threw a few wine glasses at that guy,” she recalled.

Maybe I deposited a dozen books all told, doing a freelance harvest of a dozen readers. When it was time to start the purge, I mused one day to Alicia that Little Free Libraries weren’t just a good way to find an audience. They could also be a way to recycle the rest of the Key Porter books. 

She told me that her neighbourhood is full of them, so we decided to do a walk. Some proved to be official libraries set up through a project based in Minnesota, a non-profit that started in 2009 when one man put up a model of a one-room schoolhouse filled with books to honour his mother, who loved reading.

It grew exponentially, so now there are more than 50,000 Little Free Libraries registered in 70 countries around the world. There are also freelance efforts, some of them in Alicia’s neighborhood: colourful little houses like twee mailboxes on posts. We chose a sunny day to tour the libraries, Alicia’s husband Charles having kindly mapped the ones in their neighbourhood when he went out on his daily walks. Map in hand, eighteen books in our backpacks, we headed north into East York.

Of course, I wasn’t just there to distribute books. It was also a reason to go for a walk with a friend on a warm fall day. Eerily warm. Toronto’s weather this fall has been setting records, and that day was very still, like a held breath. I wrote about the feeling of the day in my journal, and that was another reason to flaneuse around Toronto.

I’m always looking for material, and if I ever set a story or scene in the fall of 2024, I’ll be able to call up the uneasy warmth that day, the way the leaves were slow to turn and how dry they were, brown and rattling and crackling whenever a ghost of a wind blew through the treetops. 

What else did I see? East York is now part of greater Toronto, but used to be its own municipality with its own planning department, or lack of one. That means the housing is a jumble, big houses beside row houses, a bungalow then a semi-detached. Younger people can find places to rent or buy here, despite Toronto’s extortionate housing market. (I thought that maybe my protagonist could, toward the end of my current novel-in-progress). The vibe is artsy and funky and community-oriented, which explains the profusion of libraries. 

Weaving our way from one to the next, Alicia and I crossed paths with legions of parents pushing strollers, who nodded and smiled pleasantly. Passed an impressive vegetable garden on a corner with juicy red tomatoes, huge purple cabbages and bladeless hockey sticks holding up beans. Noticed that the younger trees were turning brilliant red and yellow, quick to put on their finery, even as the more venerable maples were slow to change. 

I picked up three books along the way, one by David Sedaris to give to a fan in my family, the second a memoir by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Living to Tell the Tale, which (mini-review) proved to be brilliant and garrulous, an astonishingly-detailed look at a visit to his home town that inspired One Hundred Years of Solitude. The third was a prize-winning international bestseller from fifteen years ago, title also redacted. When I read the first few chapters later that week, it struck me as a book that hadn’t aged well, and that gave me something to think about as I continued to stock little libraries with my own backlist books. 

The novel had clearly caught the zeitgeist when it was published: neon-bright, cheeky and just what was needed. Now its cheekiness felt passé, and there was no depth to bolster it. I’ve come to think of catching the zeitgeist as a particular talent that some artists have, not just writers. No doubt some just get lucky. But there are artists who seem able to sense a trend that’s about to arrive and create their work in communication with it, so it reads as just right when it’s published or performed. 

I think I’m good at story-telling, dialogue, other technical skills, but I’ve never been good at hitting the zeitgeist. After I put the book aside, I began to ask myself what that meant. Does it speak to the quality of my work? Should I approach my subjects differently? Or am I just unlucky—perhaps normal is the word—in lacking a prizewinning international bestseller? Maybe if I knew the answers to those questions I could catch a wave myself. In the meantime, I decided that I stand by my books and will keep scattering them around the city.

We arrived back at Alicia’s house eighteen books down. I have to admit I shoved the last pair into one Little Library, since by then we wanted some tea. Alicia would later tell me that when she checked back a few days later, all the books we’d left were gone.

Next time: the second leg of my Little Free Library tour. Which got strange.