With Tiny Libraries, Bringing Free Literature to the Streets

They look like trellises and fishtanks, spacesuits and mailboxes. One squeezes into the cracks of a historic building. Others offer built-in seating.

New York, meet your newest public libraries.

Holding no more than about 20 books for old and young, the 10 new Little Free Libraries â€" miniature lending libraries where anyone can take or leave a book under the honor system â€" will pop up all over downtown Manhattan on Saturday afternoon, and will stand until Sept. 1. A joint project of the PEN World Voices Festival and the Architectural League of New York, the libraries were designed and built by the winners of a small architectural competition, stocked with donations from publishers and looked after by nearby community partners including the Cooper Union, Henry Street Settlement and LaMaMa.

Until now, there has been only one Little Free Library in New York: a self-installed location that resembles an oversized mailbox on a residential street in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. That puts the city behind such disparate competitors as Mesa, Ariz. (three miniature libraries, according to a global Little Free Library map) and Wauwatosa, Wisc. (six).

Jakab Orsos, the director of the PEN World Voices Festival, which features events and workshops with international authors this week, said he heard about the Little Free Library concept last year and almost immediately decided to bring some to New York.

“It’s such a rich, such a romantic idea,” he said on Thursday, waxing lyrical about the pleasures of literature. “It really restores my faith, this connectedness â€" how people are actually harboring the beauty of reading and the book and the importance of the book.”

A panel of judges winnowed nearly 80 submissions for the new libraries down to 10, favoring local architects, innovation and the use of sustainable or recycled materials. The teams will install their libraries on Saturday afternoon, when the PEN Festival will offer self-guided walking tours to each location. (Would-be library visitors can pick up maps at the Architectural League’s booth at the IDEAS CITY street festival on the Bowery, near the New Museum.)

PEN will stock each library with a selection of children’s and adult books donated by publishers. The library outside the Abrons Arts Center at the Henry Street Settlement, for instance, will lend popular titles like one of the books in the “Hunger Games” trilogy by Suzanne Collins and “The Tiger’s Wife” by Téa Obreht alongside more classic fare, like books by Virginia Woolf and the children’s favorite Beverly Cleary. Each community partner will look after the book shelters until September, when the organizers will re-evaluate them and decide whether to keep them in place longer.

The libraries range in size from overgrown birdfeeders to a series of book-hiding benches; one of the largest will be outside St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral School on Prince Street in SoHo, where the designers, Marcelo Ertorteguy and Sara Valente of Stereotank, will install a phone-booth-like structure with open sides and books in an enclosed upper alcove. “We wanted to create a Little Free Library you can inhabit,” Mr. Ertorteguy said.

Outside the Abrons Center at the Henry Street Settlement, Brigette Borders and Forrest Jessee will install a series of wood-slatted seats over three existing concrete benches, with the books sheltering neatly under some of the seat backs. Anybody who borrows a book will find a special bookmark inside that offers a self-guided “reading journey” to Ms. Borders and Mr. Jessee’s favorite reading spots, like the Housing Works Bookstore Café and some of SoHo’s tiny parks â€" ending, of course, with another Little Free Library.

The two designers, who form a partnership called Studio Point 0, said their Little Free Library reflected the social nature of reading, from the reading journeys to the switchback seats that encourage readers at their location to face each other.

“People like to read in groups, like to read in public,” said Ms. Borders. “We’re hoping to bring people together around the activity of reading.”

Cooper Union’s Little Free Library will be installed not outside a building, but in the gaps of the school’s own library building, in part to honor the building’s history as New York City’s first free public reading room. The recessed gaps between columns in the building’s stone facade will house shelves of folded steel plates holding books, so that the two libraries â€" large and little â€" will all but merge, said Michael Young, an assistant professor at Cooper Union who oversaw the student designers who proposed and built the concept. (The lead designers were Maja Hjerten Knutsonand Chris Taleff.)

Mr. Orsos said he was impressed with the quality of designs and hopeful that New Yorkers would embrace their new libraries. But, he added, he was prepared for the reality that on these busy street corners, the structures could easily disappear overnight.

“Yes, it’s beautiful, it’s a romantic idea, everyone is going to be happy, but in two days’ time, they may see an end of a beautiful project. So our sorrow is embedded in it,” he said, adding that perhaps not all of the libraries were destined for happy endings.

As writers and readers of great literature know, he said, “Life is life, and not everything is rosy.”