Near the entrance of Lincoln Elementary in Redondo Beach, there is an unassuming red box.
Its post decorated with the handprints of second-graders, these stamped in paint of primary colors, the receptacle resembles a letterbox.
And it’s sheltering letters, to be sure, but not the kind bearing stamps and return addresses. This is a home for books, built by Brooke Buller’s second-grade class as part of a campaign to promote literacy.
The model is identical to Little Free Library, a nationwide movement conceived by a man named Todd in Wisconsin in 2009. In memoriam to his late mother, who had been a schoolteacher, Todd built a box reminiscent of a one-room schoolhouse. He filled it with books, planted it in his front yard, and advertised “Free Books.” The idea caught on, and now there are hundreds of iterations of the Little Free Library – a last bastion of actual book exchange in an increasingly digitized world.
Buller and her students envision their neighborhood library facilitating community-wide book exchange — the idea being to “take a book, bring three back,” Buller said. Already, her students have donated more than 100 books to the little red box project.
“This is about giving and having a place for our community to get books,” Lincoln’s principal, Jeff Winckler, said at a launch ceremony, attended by proud students and their camera-happy parents on Wednesday morning.
Second-grade students, beaming with pride, posed for photos with Mayor Steve Aspel and chatted about who would be able to keep the red ribbon tying the book box shut after Buller cut it to mark the library’s grand opening.
One parent shared that her daughter reported being proud of the global potential of the little red box – a useful resource, the girl thought, for anybody and “not just for Redondo Beach but also for China.”
Buller laughed, and confirmed that anyone — any member of the reading public — is welcome to the neighborhood library.
“Everyone can come and read these books – any age, it’s open to everybody, even someone in China,” she said, smiling.
