Last year Logan Square got a new neighborhood library. Last month it unexpectedly got another one, on the sidewalk around the corner from Lula Cafe. It’s small, unfunded, and self-maintaining–in fact, it doesn’t have any employees at all. It’s easy to miss it altogether, but if you look again at what appears to be an old newspaper honor box, you’ll see the words on its side, painted in bright green over white puffy clouds: free books! Below, in smaller letters, is written: COMMUNITY BOOK EXCHANGE. LOGAN SQAURE BRANCH.
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The exchange is the creation of Ryan Duggan, a Logan Square resident and graphic designer who’s a year out of Columbia College. “I kind of got the idea in my sleep,” he says. “One day I just woke up and thought, if I took one of those boxes and repainted it, I could fit a lot of books in there. Everyone has books worth reading that they’re not going to reread.” A free book exchange might get those books into the hands of people who would read them, Duggan thought. As the box says, “You give, you take, everyone reads!”
Among the 20-odd titles in the box about a week ago were plays by Euripides, a well-reviewed recent history of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and a copy of Iola Leary, a classic novel of post-Civil War African-American life. The next day brought Ian Buruma’s erudite essay collection The Missionary and the Libertine, the next day a doorstop about Microsoft’s Project 98 software. Duggan’s found a book of Zen poetry, a book of Merle Haggard guitar tabs, and a copy of Arthur Yorinks’s The Flying Latke. All he does now is look inside. “It’s totally autonomous,” he says.
