A year ago, my wife, our friend Cesar, and I started a non-profit project called The Little Book House (La casita de los libros). It is partly an experiment and partly a way to share how much we like reading.

The project consists of placing little houses with books in houses or parks in the city, so that people can take them and have more access to reading, the only rule: Take one and leave one. The little house would not be under supervision, so our main concern (very Latin American style) was that it would be vandalized and/or the books stolen.

To start, we went to a used book market, and with the help of some donations, we gathered about 25 books and built the wooden house, which by the way turned out 💯. We installed it in a park in a middle-class neighborhood in the city of Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico. These were the approximate costs of a little house in Mexican pesos ($1.00 USD ~= $20.00 MXN in 2021):

  • Books: $2500.00 MXN
  • Construction material: $1200.00 MXN
  • Transport, gasoline, etc: $300.00 MXN Total ~= $4000.00 MXN (About $200 USD in 2021)

We saved on labor because Cesar did a great job building the house; if you want to see the result you can do so on the Facebook page.

We loved being part of this project, but since we had to move to another city it has been impossible for us to continue from the outside and it has been put on hold. It is a pleasure to share the results we have obtained so far:

  • To our surprise, the little house has not been vandalized; it is still standing and the neighbors have taken care of it. We believe that in part it was because we talked to some neighbors around the park and told them about the project so that they would make it theirs.
  • Several adults and children approached with interest at the time of installing the house to see what it was and they liked the idea.
  • There is also not-so-good news: Although there has been an exchange of books, the books we left at the beginning (Stephen King, Dracula, The Witcher, Children’s Stories, etc.) were exchanged for less “interesting” books such as “Overview of agriculture in Sinaloa between 1980 and 1986”, which are for a very specific niche of people.

With this, we reached the conclusion that although people want to read, books are expensive and not everyone can afford the luxury of leaving a commercial book.

We plan to continue with the project in the future when we find how to solve these problems; I will be posting later when we resume it.