There’s a new library in town
by Dawn Ballou, Pinedale Online!
October 19, 2014
And it’s tiny. It’s located on the outside of the Dandylion Den gift shop in Pinedale. It’s one of the newest "Little Free Library"s that are popping up in neighborhoods all across the county as a fun way to encourage reading and community. The new little library was installed in mid-October and is ready to use.
What is a Little Free Library? It’s a "take a book, return a book" gathering place where neighbors share their favorite literature and stories. In its most basic form, a Little Free Library is a box full of books where anyone may stop by and pick up a book (or two) and bring back another book to share. The goal is to promote literacy and the love of reading by building free book exchanges worldwide.
Pinedale’s newest little library was put up by Kristy Sims who saw the idea from news stories about ones other people have done. She asked local carpenter Chris Lockwood to build her library case and he installed it on the outside of her store, the Dandylion Den, on south Sublette Avenue.
Little Free Library book cases come in all sorts of sizes, shapes, clever designs and colors. Most all have glass front doors to see the books inside. Cases placed outside are watertight to keep out the weather.
Sims went to the Pinedale Food Basket to stock it with the first set of books, a mixture of adult and children’s books. She then found a nice bench to place next to the new Library. Sims named the new library the "Jimmy Sims Little Free Library," after one of her sons.
The first little libraries began to appear in 2009, and since then more and more people liked the idea and started making them. With the great grassroots movement, LittleFreeLibrary.org became a non-profit organization in 2012 in Wisconsin. They had the goal to build 2,510 Little Free Libraries—as many as Andrew Carnegie—and keep going. They reached that goal in August of 2012, a year and a half before their original target date. By January of 2014, the total number of registered Little Free Libraries in the world was conservatively estimated to be nearly 15,000, with thousands more being built. The idea has grown to other countries worldwide The Jimmy Sims Little Free Library has Charter No. 18,798.
Check it out!
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