Built of timber and filled with paper, a ‘Little Free Library’ doesn’t stand a chance against fire-wielding vandals.
Last week, five of the give-and-take book boxes were mysteriously burnt to the ground across the Tri-Cities — one in Coquitlam and four in Port Coquitlam.*
But that hasn’t slowed one Coquitlam boy down.
Last December, Nolan Dempsey’s teachers asked him and the rest of the students at Leigh Elementary School to come up with one way to change the world.
Some of the kids did a shoe drive; some collected blankets and towels for the SPCA; and others collected bottles, donating the money to the Children's Hospital.
For the Dempsey’s, it was always going to be about books.
“I'm a teacher. My mom's a teacher. We like reading,” said Nolan’s mother Jen Dempsey.
The family rounded up some of their own books and collected more from family and friends. Then Jen Dempsey put up a blurb on the Burke Mountain community Facebook page and found herself picking up bags of books from complete strangers.
By spring break, Nolan Dempsey was ready to start stocking the 40-plus ‘Little Libraries’ scattered across the Tri-Cities. They needed to strategize, so to make things easier, Jen reached out to Ann Johannes, the Tri-Cities literacy outreach coordinator who had been compiling a map of ‘Little Free Libraries’ across the region.
The worldwide phenomenon of ‘Little Free Libraries’ celebrated its 10-year anniversary this year, though Johannes says they didn’t arrive in the Tri-Cities until about five years ago.
First dreamed up by Todd H. Bol as a tribute to his teacher mother in Hudson, Wisconsin, there are now over 80,000 ‘Little Free Libraries’ in over 90 countries around the world, according to the organization’s website.
With only four traditional libraries across the Tri-Cities, ‘Little Free Libraries’ fill an important niche for a lot of families unable or unwilling to make the trip, says Johannes.
“They're always open, they're always available,” she said of the book kiosks.
Some ‘Little Free Libraries’ get funding from local community organizations, others are built by people with their own tools right in front of their house. In Port Coquitlam, the city has chipped in, supporting the installation of 20 ‘Little Libraries’ by 2020 (17 have been built so far).
No matter how a ‘Little Free Library’ is built, each one ends up attached to a steward, a person responsible for filling them up, cleaning them out, and making sure they’re in good working order.
“It's just a nice, feel good thing,” said Johannes.
That is, of course, until vandals go out one week and burn five of them to the ground.
The ‘Little Free Libraries’ at Elks, Aggie, McLean, Norm Staff and Wellington parks have been completely destroyed. And while both the cities of Coquitlam and Port Coquitlam will help to rebuild most of them, the ‘Little Free Library’ at Wellington Park will not be part of the reconstruction plans, said Johannes.
This is the second time in less than a year that someone (or the same person?) burned down the ‘Little Free Library’ at Wellington Park.
The United Way-funded Avenues for Change project had rebuilt the library in the past, but after getting targeted twice, they’re giving up on the Wellington Park location.
Johannes, for her part, is trying to get the word out to people across the Tri-Cities to keep an eye out for suspicious behaviour and to call a police non-emergency number if they see anything.
“Everyone needs to take on some vigilance,” she said. “Just like it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community to watch over these little free libraries.”
But burning down cute little libraries is a tough message for a 6-year-old like Nolan Dempsey, and he has found it hard to make sense of the senseless vandalism, said his mother Jen.
List in hand, the mother-son duo had dutifully gone from ‘Little Free Library’ to ‘Little Free Library,’ filling them up one at a time.
“He was always so excited to fill them because we could tell that they were being used by all types of different families,” said Jen Dempsey.
Then they came across the remains of one of the recenlty incinerated libraries.
“It's kind of hard to explain to a six-year-old when you drive up with this big bag of books that someone would want to ruin something on purpose,” she said.
Maybe it was because Nolan Dempsey is turning seven today, April 6, or maybe he’s just empathetic by nature — but when asked what the best part of the whole experience has been, he remained focused on the little part of the world he can still make better.
“If kids open the library and it’s empty, they will be sad,” he said.
*Since the publication of this article, the Coquitlam RCMP has said seven "Little Free Libraries" have been burned and are asking any witnesses with information to come forward to police.
@StefanLabbe
