I’ve always been a bit of a Tom Wolfe fan, back since I read The Right Stuff at age 16. The movie, which was made around that time, remains one of my all time favourite films (indeed, you might have read something I wrote here a few years ago comparing the movie to the new TV series – the latter misses the point of the book and the movie entirely).
I’ve read all of his actual novels since then, but they don’t really do it for me the way his journalism does.
Still, The Bonfire of the Vanities is, alongside American Psycho, one of the most telling novels about the materialism and moral vacuousness of late 1980s New York. [Coincidentally, both are published by Picador.]
So, en route to a dinner party at a friend’s house in North Carlton last month, I was pleasantly surprised to see a copy of Bonfire in a street library a couple of streets away from my destination (not that I can understand why anyone would abandon any book by Tom Wolfe in a street library). I picked it up and took it along with me to dinner and promptly presented it to my friends, who were happy to add it to their book case.
Which goes to show what treasures you can find in street libraries.
The street library phenomenon seems to be quite new.
There have been passive book exchanges for a while – such as the one which was at the Highpoint bus station for a while when the Covid started, and the fridge used as a book exchange at Newmarket station where I left a large box of books a couple of years ago (the fridge is still there, but it is currently almost completely empty of books).
But now, it seems that street libraries are popping up everywhere like mushrooms. They usually consist of a wooden bird box shaped structure with a perspex door mounted on top of the fence line in front of someone’s house.
Right now, there are three within easy walking distance of my home, and another three in Waterford Green just over the river.
You might want to have a look yourself at the map:
I get the general idea that the rise of the street library might be a side reaction to the years of Covid isolation – a way for people to cope with the lockdowns and rebuild some sort of connection with other people in a manner which was Covid-safe.
Just like the odd copy of a Tom Wolfe novel, there are often treasures to be found there. I picked up a biography of Charles Lindbergh in one last year (an old one from before the revelation that he had two secret families in Germany came out), a battered paperback of Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series, and a spare copy of The Fellowship of the Ring (you can never have too many copies of Tolkien).
For me, the value of street libraries is not just the occasional treasure that I can find, but the opportunity to offload a lot of my books. Whilst my personal library is about 2000 books in size, I have had the feeling for years that I am at ‘peak library’ and that there are a lot of books that I read (SciFi, Fantasy, detective novels etc) onto which I do not really want to hold. I do give many books to family and friends, but that does not take care of all of the overflow from my library. Hence, merrily taking a lot of books down to the nearest street library is a liberating feeling.
Lost For Words! 