UBC’s new Free Little Library won’t take your library card, but it will take your used books

There’s a new library on campus, and it refuses to take my UBC Card.

The new Free Little Library looks just like the UBC Press building, whose front steps it sits beside. You might be tricked into thinking that you’ve stumbled into the UBC of Lilliput, but that’s on purpose.

“We joked about making it a little replica of our (somewhat decrepit) building,” said Liz Hudson, UBC Press’s sales, inventory and distribution coordinator said in an email statement. “I read about the UTown@UBC Community Grant. I applied for and was awarded money to have the Free Little Library built.”

Hudson explained that they “managed to source leftover wood from [the] building renovations last fall” and that most of the work “came from [a] colleague’s brother who ... put so much care, attention and creativity into building the Free Little Library so that it was the exact replica of Ponderosa B.”

The Press hopes that the little library will be a place for all readers, where anyone can take a book and leave books for others. The Free Little Library was a tad short on books when I visited, but Hudson has sounded a call for more donations.

“The Free Little Library’s appetite for books is insatiable,” Hudson assured.

If you are as bad as I am at returning library books on time and spend your paycheques paying off library fees, you’ll probably appreciate the Free Little Library — even if it does make you feel like a giant.

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