16 Jul 2011

What actually compels me isn’t the access to books (where yes, a library would clearly be superior) but the curiosity associated with browsing the spines to see what your neighbors are reading and giving away. Tell me if you find one of these in Brooklyn, you’re going to walk straight past it because there’s a library somewhere. No way! gethustle: frozenteeth: gotsound: Neighbourhood Bookshelves One of the novelties of living in my new place just off Commercial Drive in the past two months is having this Neighbourhood Bookshelves placed on the back alley of my apartment building. People are free to take a book or leave a book. Every once in a while I check and notice that there’s always a heavy rotation of new used books there.  You’d expect to see a lot of cheesy romance novels and unwanted Stephen King books from this kind of thing. But while it’s true that outdated technical books always seem to colour the inside of these shelves, you can really score true gems for free if you frequent it enough. I, for one, have scored Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, among others, in the past month alone. It just shows how literate and awesome my neighbours are. Clearly this needs to exist everywhere in the city.  Want. Don’t need, but want. After selling my considerable book collection in preparation for the cross-country move I have discovered these amazing places called libraries where I can get books for free and then just give them back! No joke guys. Google that shit.

What actually compels me isn’t the access to books (where yes, a library would clearly be superior) but the curiosity associated with browsing the spines to see what your neighbors are reading and giving away. Tell me if you find one of these in Brooklyn, you’re going to walk straight past it because there’s a library somewhere. No way!

gethustle:

frozenteeth:

gotsound:

Neighbourhood Bookshelves

One of the novelties of living in my new place just off Commercial Drive in the past two months is having this Neighbourhood Bookshelves placed on the back alley of my apartment building. People are free to take a book or leave a book. Every once in a while I check and notice that there’s always a heavy rotation of new used books there. 

You’d expect to see a lot of cheesy romance novels and unwanted Stephen King books from this kind of thing. But while it’s true that outdated technical books always seem to colour the inside of these shelves, you can really score true gems for free if you frequent it enough. I, for one, have scored Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, among others, in the past month alone. It just shows how literate and awesome my neighbours are.

Clearly this needs to exist everywhere in the city. 

Want. Don’t need, but want.

After selling my considerable book collection in preparation for the cross-country move I have discovered these amazing places called libraries where I can get books for free and then just give them back! No joke guys. Google that shit.