Take one, leave one

Have you seen a "take one, leave one" library? I don't know how common they are. It's a library of paperback books. The idea is that you leave the paperback you just finished and pick up one that is new to you.

We have one at Innsbrook in two rooms attached to the woodhouse and I saw one during our Special Libraries class last summer at the Scott Air Force library. I have also heard of one in a cafe in a resort area.

At first thought, one might think that people would take advantage of free books and these collections would shrink. In fact, they grow. If a person uses the library as intended (leave a book, take a book, and keep bringing back each book they take), the collection has already grown by one. Sometimes people bring three books but only take one. They go away knowing that the library owes them a couple of books someday and are happy with that. I've seen people at Innsbrook bring in a sack of books and figure that they and their guests are covered for awhile.

I wonder if this would work at a college, particularly one where the campus library doesn't collect for pleasure reading. Would the exchange library grow or would it diminish in the presence of poor college students with nothing to read? Or, perhaps, it would breathe as Matthew Battle says in Library: An Unquiet History about academic libraries: exhaling books, then sucking them back in a quick inhale at the end of the semester when students clear out their spaces.

A "take one, leave one" library could be embedded in the campus library. But it might be a service that the library could use to reach out to where the students are--in a cafe, at the student center, or in the dorms. Once it was set up, it could be ignored--although it might stay neater and more attractive if a librarian checked it once in awhile, maybe alphabetizing the books by author and/or categorizing them by genre.

I finished writing the above while watching the London coverage on the Today show this morning. Now I'm listening to BBC Radio Five Live over the Internet.

Now that I'm on the Internet, I actually did locate instances where paperback exchanges are happening at colleges. The article "Paperbacks and a Percolator: Fostering a Sense of Community in the Academic Library" in Mississippi Libraries, Spring 2005, describes a program at Louisiana State University that began with 250 donated paperbacks on a shelf near the Reference Desk. The Outreach Librarian there had input from at least one other academic library providing a similar service. I accessed that article through the Library Literature database, but there is a pdf of that entire issue of Mississippi Libraries. The article begins on page 6.     #

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