By Maria Popova

The son of a Wisconsin schoolteacher, Todd Bol was well into his fifties when he dreamt up the first Little Free Library, not expecting that tens of thousands of these tiny shrines to the love of reading would sprout around the world to outlive him.

I was visiting a friend on the other side of the continent when I encountered a Little Free Library for the first time. I fell in love instantly. Years passed. I kept thinking about it. As soon as I moved into my Brooklyn home in the autumn of 2018, I put one up in front of my house, painted it yellow, and left a few well-loved books inside.

That week, Todd Bol died.

In the years since, in our community of artists and low-income families with kids, nowhere near a bookstore, with only an understocked and overrun public library branch to suffice, I have watched my Little Free Library bustle with books given and taken, spanning the entire spectrum of genres, eras, and sensibilities.

A day in the life of my Little Free Library

One day during a challenging season of being, longing for something that would turn my spiraling mind outward, knowing that a daily creative practice has always been my best medicine and that constraint is the mightiest catalyst of creativity, I decided to try applying my bird divination process to the Little Free Library, trusting the lovely way our imagination has of surprising us and, in doing so, reminding us that even in the bleakest moments it is worth turning the page of experience because the imagination of life is always greater than that of the living.

Every day for thirty days, I took a random book from the Little Free Library, opened to a random page, and worked with the text on it, making no aesthetic judgments about the literary value of the books — self-help, airport romance novels, finance textbooks, breastfeeding guides, Lemony Snicket, Tolstoy, Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and the Bible were all raw material on equal par.

As every creative person knows, and as Lewis Carroll so perfectly articulated in his advice on working through difficulty in math and in life, our most original and unexpected ideas arrive not when we strain the mind at the problem, but when we relax it and shift the beam of attention to something else entirely; it is then that the unconscious shines its sidewise gleam on an unexpected solution no deliberate effort could have produced.

After reading over the page, I would take a long walk to let the words float in my mind as I knelt to look at small things — pebbles, petals, leaves, feathers, and a whole lot of that great teacher in resilience, lichen — picking one thing up to take home. The words invariably arranged themselves unconsciously into the day’s… divination? koan? poem?… that always surprised me, always revealed what I myself needed to hear that some part of me already knew.

Upon returning home, I would place the found object under my microscope and take a photograph — cellular and planetary at the same time, itself an invitation to a shift in perspective — then begin laying out the text over the image.

Here they all are — perhaps uncommon gifts for the book-lover in your life, perhaps simply inspiration to try the practice yourself — available as translucent 4×4 blocks with proceeds supporting my endeavor to put up Little Free Libraries in book deserts throughout the five boroughs of New York City — communities more than a mile from a public library or bookstore.

Words from a page in Ever After by Nora Roberts over micrograph of lichen. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in The Decline of Pleasure by Walter Kerr over micrograph of mica from my hometown in Bulgaria. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in The Daughter of the Queen of Sheba by Jacki Lyden over micrograph of maple leaf. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover over micrograph of woodpecker feather. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in Homo Viator by Gabriel Marcel over micrograph of bluejay feather. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in Bee Season by Myla Goldberg over micrograph of lichen. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in the Bible over micrograph of the season’s last fig from the neighborhood tree. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in Squeeze by Steven J. Pipe over micrograph of lichen. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West by Victoria Glendinning over micrograph of lichen. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in Stuff White People Like by Christian Lander over micrograph of paperback birch leaf. Available as an acrylic block.Words from a page in Words from a page in Room by Emma Donoghue over micrograph of red cedar needle. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell over micrograph of smokebush leaf. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in Naked by David Sedaris over micrograph of mica from Coney Island beach. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in John Cleare by John Cleare over micrograph of ginkgo leaf. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in The Life of Chuck by Stephen King over micrograph of lichen. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in Reflections on Language by Stuart Hirschberg and Terry Herschberg over micrograph of withered trillium leaf. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in Inside of a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz over micrograph of lichen. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in Scarpetta by Patricia Cornwell over micrograph of smokebush leaf. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in House of Incest by Anaïs Nin over micrograph of Japanese maple leaf. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling over micrograph of smokebush leaf. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure by James West Davidson and John Rugge over micrograph of spirea leaf. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in Freak of Nurture by Kelli Dunham over micrograph of maple leaf. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in Dark Fires by Nora Roberts over micrograph of madrone bark. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch over micrograph of dying ficus leaf. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in The Changing World Order by Ray Dalio over micrograph of popcorn. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in Becoming a Person by Carl R. Rogers over micrograph of bluebird feather. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand over micrograph of calendula from my grandmother’s garden. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket over micrograph of lichen. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in The Arc by Tory Henwood Hoen over micrograph of lichen. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in All Adults Here by Emma Straub over micrograph of ginkgo leaf. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende over micrograph of staghorn sumac bloom. Available as an acrylic block. Words from a page in The Girls by Emma Cline over micrograph of wild persimmon seed. Available as an acrylic block.

— Published December 7, 2025 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2025/12/07/little-free-library-divinations/ —

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