Then COVID-19 struck, and everything changed. I even watched one neglected Little Free Library rot and fall apart from disuse, a sight that traumatizes me to this day. Day in and day out I’d pass these ghost libraries on the bike ride to my son’s school, rolling my eyes at the Tom Clancys and James Pattersons that never left the shelves, as if they were squatting there to keep books people actually wanted to read from moving in. However picturesque they looked, the libraries stood there either empty (save for ancient tomes on marketing written before the internet, food-encrusted picture books spotted with cover mold, etc.) or saddled with the same boring stack of Barnes & Noble remainders everybody had already read or didn’t want to read. With practically everybody putting up a little free library, the little structures become so much background noise, like fire hydrants or post-911 yard flags circa 2003. So many of my neighbors had taken up ’s nonprofit mission to share books and promote literacy that the glut had nearly robbed the whole endeavor of its magic. You couldn’t walk a block without bumping into one book-lending box after another on their curbside posts. By the start of 2020, it was headed for a full-scale borrowed-book market collapse. My neighborhood had achieved a state of peak Little Free Library years ago.
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