The last of my backlist books found their way into Little Free Libraries a few days ago—this time with the help of a small assistant. They’re now known around here as Tiny Libraries, and my autumn project of giving away four boxes of books sent by a bankrupt publisher has come to a slightly-belated close.

I know people don’t really do this, but off and on for several months I’ve slipped copies of a couple of my backlist titles into Little Free Libraries around Toronto and Hamilton. As I’ve written, I wanted to find readers, do a house purge, explore unfamiliar neighbourhoods and ramble around with friends. It was also a haphazard research project. The novel I’m working on is set in Toronto, and as a writer you always hope to stumble on details you can’t make up. Call my project a controlled stumble.

Plus, who knew a friend would reach into a Little Library and pull out a book written by a man I hadn’t realized she’d dated? (“I threw a few wine glasses at that guy.”)

By late October, I still had a couple of boxes of books left. One day, needing to get away from my desk, I searched out a few nearby Little Free Libraries on the organization’s site map and set out with five books in my backpack. It was 23°C and flat warm, summer warm. There was no wind, and the leaves were yellow on the trees.

These past few years, warmth has lingered into November in Toronto, although unfortunately we pay for it: it’s been unusually cold through April. I recently read that Inuit elders have noticed a slight change in the location of the stars. Scientists have confirmed that the earth has shifted a little on its axis, perhaps because the melting water from both poles is gathering at the equator, skewing the balance of the planet and maybe its seasons.

Passing our local playground, I saw a girl of about 16 swinging on one of the kiddie swings, going higher and higher until she took a carefully-timed jump to the ground. She was wearing her backpack and looked proud of herself, and amused, and underneath it all sweetly happy. I was still smiling as I walked up to the first little library, where someone had propped a King of Diamonds playing card in front of the books. I eased it aside so I could put in a copy of my travel memoir, Foreign Correspondences. 

It was my last copy. The publisher had apparently sold more copies of the memoir than my second novel, Drink the Sky, which I hadn’t noticed when the four boxes were full. Now most of the remaining books were novels, although as the boxes emptied, I’d thrown in a few copies of my first short story collection, Hard Travel, along a French-language anthology in which I had a story. That meant I still had more than thirty books to give out, half of them in a box I’d started keeping in my car for miscellaneous off-loading.

So—one book down that day. Two, when I reached a freelance library a couple of streets over that proved to have a few French titles. I slipped in a copy of the anthology, Toronto: accidents do parcours, edited by Linda Spalding. Afterward I turned north, arriving at another residential street in time to see a man land a drone in the middle of the road. 

“I’ve never seen one of those in person,” I said as I walked up. “They’re pretty cool.”

“Beats climbing a ladder,” he replied. 

I realized the man was wearing a tee-shirt with a roofing company logo. He turned and called to a couple of women sitting on some front steps: “You wanna see a picture of your roof?” 

“I thoroughly enjoyed watching that,” one woman called back.

I found the third Little Free Library at the end of the street, the fourth near at the top of a road with an ice cream parlour at the bottom (chocolate, please), the day’s final library a little to the south. A while later, as I reached our front walk, one of our neighbours was arriving home from work and waved out his car window. The guy across the street was heading out on his bike. It was an ordinary and slightly extraordinary day.

***

A couple of weeks later, I set off on a book walk with my friend Yvonne through Seaton Village in the west end. It was November 7 and the weather was still 21°C and eerily beautiful. We ate lunch at a picnic table outside Donna’s restaurant on Lansdowne. (I recommend the artichoke soup.) Afterward, we loaded maybe 15 books into our backpacks and set off, Yvonne wielding the map I’d scrawled with a collection of addresses.

At first, we walked through a Portuguese neighbourhood. A printed tile above a tiny whimsical front garden said, Se tens inveja do meu vivir trabalha malandro! Roughly, You’re just jealous of my life’s work, you badass! Put a comma after vivir and you get: If you’re jealous of my way of life, get to work, badass!

In Brazilian Portuguese, the verb trabalhar–to work–can also have connotations of macumba and candomblé, meaning work done supernaturally. When I lived in Brazil, I knew people who talked about macumba priests doing graveyard work. I’m not sure that’s implied by this tile. But maybe there’s an evil eye glimmering behind the words? Narrowed eyes, at least.

I had to laugh. Here we were, discussing the hidden meaning of a Portuguese tile while distributing copies of Drink the Sky, which is set in Brazil.

There was a little library not far from the tile, and nearby was another sign I liked: Belarusan Autocephalous Orthodox Church. Dipping into an industrial area, we couldn’t find one of the libraries listed on the official site, which was supposed to be outside a beat-up factory converted into walk-up apartments/studios. But nearby we found a third memorable sign on a glass door, The Kind Human Club. It had slogans on each of the four inside steps. TRUST THE PROCESS. Step: ENJOY THE JOURNEY. Step: YOU’RE DOING AMAZING. Step: KNOW THAT YOU ARE LOVED.

Amazing instead of amazingly. Take an inhale instead of an inhalation. The new staccato rhythm of English.

We walked a staccato route that afternoon from tiny houses to industrial conversions, passing through shadows on the way, liminal spots beneath immense high rises under noisy construction. Soon we found ourselves strolling past the solid brick houses on Rusholme Road. The cliché is true: Toronto really is a city of neighbourhoods, one bashed up against another. Yet along our crooked route, a surprising number of Little Free Libraries were scant of titles, and near Rusholme Road we found out why. 

A guy was scavenging books from one of the little libraries, filling a cardboard box, probably planning to sell the books and looking as if he needed money for food. Yvonne and I paused a few steps away to discuss what to do about the library, communicating mostly with our eyebrows.

“Would you like a book?” Yvonne eventually asked, holding out a copy of my novel.

“Oh, thank you,” the man said, sounding remarkably pleased. I wondered if he was happy to have a book in good condition to sell or whether he might actually want to read it. He was scanning the back cover copy as we slipped another book into the library and headed on. 

All told, we gave out 12 books that day, and Yvonne took three more to distribute in her own neighbourhood. A couple of weeks later she very kindly gave me a book at my birthday lunch to honour our walk, the updated version of Stroll: Psychogenic Walking Tours of Toronto by Shawn Micallef. Afterward, I checked my app and drove a couple of blocks to leave a copy of Hard Travel in a free library. One book gained, one book given. (I’ll write about a trio of Toronto books next time.)

***

With only a dozen titles left, another friend and I scheduled lunch and walk in early December. Yet when the day arrived, Susan had to run off after lunch, and I was just as glad to bail. The weather had finally turned cold, and I got into the car to head home, driving through the side streets to avoid traffic.

As I did, I passed a freelance library not marked on the app. Pulling over, grabbing a book out of the trunk, I jogged back and put it in. Afterward, it occurred to me that I wasn’t far from some of the libraries Susan and I had planned to visit, so I circled around and distributed five more books. It felt weirdly as if I was cheating, driving instead of walking, even though no one had set the rules of my project but me, and I hadn’t set any rules.

Yet cheating once opens the door to cheating again—I’m sure psychologists do research on this—and a week later, I took another drive. On the way to pick up a Christmas tree, I circled through southern Leslieville and dropped off several more books, passing an intriguing street along the way: Craven Road, which is bordered for a couple of very long blocks by high wooden fences that people have decorated with paintings and… let’s call them constructions.

Here’s something else: the project has left my mental map of Toronto beautifully ornamented.

As I approached the final Little Free Library that day, I saw a bicyclist looking through it and parked, waiting in the car. When she lingered, I got out with a couple of books in hand.

“Is this your little library?” I asked as I walked up.

“No. But it’s in such a jumble, people won’t use it,” she said, continuing to arrange the books.

“It’s nice of you to fix it up,” I said. “Do you mind if I put in a book? I’m a writer, and one of my publishers went bankrupt, so I’ve been putting the copies they sent me into little libraries.”

She held out her hand, and I gave her a copy of Drink the Sky. 

The woman looked at the spine. 

“Key Porter,” she said. “That’s a very good publisher.” She grew alarmed: “They didn’t go bankrupt, did they?”

Well, a dozen years ago. Those four boxes of books had been in my basement for a long time.

“Anna Porter sold the company,” I said. “And the next people—well, they didn’t keep it afloat.”

“Isn’t that always the way?” she asked.

Lingering a little, I asked if I could put in two books, thinking she might want the Key Porter novel and hoping to slip in a copy of my story collection, too. When she agreed, I drove off, leaving her to continue the fix-up, very happily aware that I had only three backlist books left. 

I also had a plan. My grandson is not quite three years old, and I thought it would be fun to burn off some of his endless amounts of energy by taking a walk. I knew there were three little libraries close to my son and daughter-in-law’s apartment, so why not hit them up?

When I arrived, my grandson looked dubious. 

“It’s a very important job,” I told him, “and I’d really appreciate your help.”

“Ok-ay,” he said, and put on his coat the way he’d learned at daycare—head down, arms in first, coat flipped over his back. My son grabbed the stroller and we headed out.

A writer needs to be alive to the world, but how much more intensely alive is a two-year-old? Heading down the walk, my grandson took deliberate steps to hear the crunch of the ice melt under his boots, kicked at the desiccated brown leaves in the margin of a garden, stopped to pick up a good-looking stick blown down by the wind. It was a remarkably cold and windy day, but the first Little Free Library was only a block away, a little past a moose painted on an electrical box–one that had to be examined closely.

When we finally arrived, my grandson marvelled, “Look at all the books in the tiny library.”

We discussed putting in one of mine and taking out a children’s book for himself, which led to a debate about several of the kids’ books and the eventual discovery of a magazine with pages of outlined animals left blank for colouring. 

“This is a good one,” he said, lingering over it for long enough that my son could slip the other books back in the library. As we headed for the next one, a block away on the south side of the street, my grandson began a running commentary.

“Now we have to cross the road” he said, “and I’ll hold your hand, and look—there aren’t any cars, so we can cross. Oh, there’s another stick. That’s a very good stick”—a forked stick, which he took while discarding the straight one—“and look, there’s another tiny library and ok-ay, you open the door.”

We put my last copy of Drink the Sky in the tiny library and chose another kids’ book, which I ended up storing in my backpack when sticks proved far more interesting: the process of putting them down on the ground then up in the air, down on the ground then up in the air, afterward finding a very long stick that had to be broken in half and used like a pair of walking poles, at least for a dozen steps. 

Eventually we reached the last tiny library, which I had been happy to find on the app advertised both French- and English-language titles. My grandson slipped in a copy of the anthology–the final copy of my final backlist title–then discovered that they didn’t have kids’ books.

This was puzzling, because why wouldn’t you have kids’ books? Fortunately, before the puzzlement devolved into disappointment, then worse, my grandson agreed it was time to get into the stroller and head home.

As we did, the wind blew hard and cold, and I thought about the fact I had spent four months getting rid of four boxes of books, and realized it had been entirely wonderful.