Little Lending Library

Libraries are cool — both big and small! The little lending library trend in neighborhoods, and the access they provide to free books, has continued to grow over the years. I’ve had several opportunities to design and build different lending libraries. My favorite is a large sculptural design located in White River State Park in Indianapolis. Others include a live roof design for the Little Free Library nonprofit organization: my college sculpture students started with a base design and went wild with the concepts. For another one, the kids of a local elementary school helped me build a medium-sized lending library for their outdoor classroom. All of those designs required quite a bit of experience and a significant amount of tools. However, the design for the project you see here, with an inverted “book” serving as its roof, requires the least amount of tools, and I’ve kept it very simple without compromising quality. It’s a project you should be able to build in a long weekend and then put up in your neighborhood the very next week!