Covid-19 has caused the closure of all public libraries in my area, but I’ve been expanding the good material to read on my bookshelf nonetheless. In the process, I’ve been competing against my ex and developing my skills in obscure languages.

I know you can order books online and get them on Kindle, but, as an old fart, nothing beats browsing through physical books. The weight of the volume, the feel and sound of the pages as you turn them, the smell of the paper. For me, it’s all part of the experience of reading.

So I was glad that, on our walks to the local park, my son Arthur and I have found no less than four mini free libraries—the aim is to take a book and replace it with another one. It’s all part of a nationwide nonprofit called Little Free Libraries. This has now become an international organization, existing in more than 90 countries with millions of books changing hands every year. As I read in a 2015 Atlantic article, the idea came from  a Wisconsin man who built one in 2009 to honor his late mother, an avid reader. Book boxes are thriving in many communities but sadly, in some areas, officious local bureaucrats are cracking down on them, telling people to tear them down if they don’t get permits.

I confess that so far, I have taken more books from my local mini free libraries than I have given. Were the pages infested with viruses? Should I have worn gloves to thumb through the titles and fumigated anything I took home?  Some people might think I was throwing caution to the winds, because I did none of these things. I’ve always had a fondness for second-hand books, so couldn’t resist looking at the contents of each of the mini libraries I passed. I found, for example, Operation Mincemeat, which I remembered that my British boyfriend had raved about (he loves wartime stuff), as well as Agent Zigzag, by the same author, Ben Macintyre. Then I found Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles. He had written a wonderful book that a friend had given my boyfriend and I had appropriated, A Gentleman in Moscow. Another book I picked up from the book-sharing box was A Year in the World, by American expat Frances Mayes. She had became famous for Under the Tuscan Sun. I knew the area Mayes was writing about from childhood vacations I had taken with my parents. Creatures of habit, they would go to the same resort in Tuscany every summer. Unlike Mayes, I would rather have gone to California. As a kid from London, San Francisco seemed a much more exciting destination than Italy.

The heftiest book I found in one of the mini-libraries was a cookbook by celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. With a name like that, it’s obvious that he’s an upper-class Brit (no, I said Brit not twit). My boyfriend in London loves Fearnley-Whittingstall’s recipes and has several of his books. This one was The River Cottage MEAT Book.  Maybe a new convert to veganism had put it in the box. As a committed carnivore, I picked it up.

In an effort to even the scales, I gave that library a book I had that was written by my ex. About a week later, I went past the same mini library again and his book was already gone. I then put my Adulterer’s Wife: How to Thrive Whether You Stay or Not book on display in there, with the cover facing front. I thought it had already been taken when we were coming back from our walk, but the book had just been moved in with the others, so that only the spine was showing. Arthur thought that someone had moved it to see what titles were behind. He remarked that the title Adulterer’s Wife made it sound like a romance novel rather than a self-help book. “My subtitle, How to Thrive Whether You Stay or Not, explains that,” I retorted. But it got me wondering whether I had chosen a confusing title, not to mention the fact that “Adulterer’s” and “Adulterous” are homonyms. I knew I would be disappointed if nobody had taken my book by the time I next went past the mini library. But I didn’t lose the book box duel between my book and my ex-husband’s. In less than a week mine was gone, so I put another copy in the second book box on my route to the park. A week later, that one disappeared too.

The third book box was on the way to a less-used path into the local park. It had an attractive redwood varnish and was accompanied by a matching bench—sadly not compliant with social distancing. This mini-library tended to have the least inviting offerings, such as novels in German and old computer program manuals. The last time I passed it, I found a checkbook. No sorry, I mean a Czech book, published in 1993, entitled Do You Want to Speak Czech? “Well maybe,” I thought. I decided to take the book because my dad came from the brand new state of Czecho-slovakia—at least that was what his birthplace was called by the time he was three, because it was the Austro-Hungarian Empire when he was born. The region kept changing borders so it was almost like every week he had to learn a new language. Perhaps I could learn some useful Czech expressions from the Czech book. Thumbing through it, I found some quirky things to say, such as, “In winter I like most of all to wear an anorak” and the wonderfully paranoid, “What do you constantly have against my acquaintances?” These were good additions to the various handy phrases I already knew in other languages: “reform through labor” in Chinese; “the Gauls are attacking the woody hillock” in Latin; “the moon comes out suddenly from behind the clouds” in German; two useful expressions in Klingon, “today is a good day to die” and the very insulting “your mother had a smooth forehead;” and finally, very important for a Monty Python fan, “my hovercraft is full of eels” in Hungarian, or at least in English with a Hungarian accent.

In exchange for the Czech book, the next time I passed the third mini library, I added—yes, you’ve guessed it—a copy of my Adulterer’s Wife book, prominently displayed, of course. I was heartened to see that the next day it was no longer there. But my book had reappeared in the first box. Was that because it had been taken by someone who didn’t like it? The book my ex had written had not been returned. That was a keeper, mine was not. Would the copies I had placed in the other two mini libraries also come back?

I consider these book-sharing boxes to be a great idea, but some people disagree. Kriston Kapps wrote an article in Citylab in 2017, “Against Little Free Libraries,” about those who consider them to be mere “virtue-signaling” and the “corporatization of literary philanthropy.” Each book box costs about $300 to buy. The critics claim these “birdhouses filled with paperbacks” only appear in wealthier neighborhoods with white residents and where traditional bricks-and-mortar libraries are already plentiful.

Obviously, I must live in an extremely wealthy area with four book-sharing boxes within walking distance. But wait—that theory doesn’t seem to work.  When I when I was married, and blissfully ignorant of my husband’s philandering, we had a much bigger, fancier house in a more expensive neighborhood than where I now reside. As far as I have seen, there are no Little Free Libraries in that area at all. Maybe the residents there are either too snooty to share books or too busy having affairs to bother to read.