Remembering Todd H. Bol, Founder of Little Free Libraries

Todd H. Bol, founder of Little Free Libraries and the recipient of the WNBA’s Second Century Prize, died October 18 of pancreatic cancer. He was sixty-two. He built the first Little Free Library in 2009 after the death of his mother, a teacher and avid reader. The little miniature schoolhouse in his front yard in Hudson, Wisconsin, filled with books, inspired a movement, not only in the United States but in more than eighty countries. “Take a book, share a book.” It was a simple idea that caught on. There are more than fifty thousand Little Free Libraries across the United States.

Little Free Library Programs

Little Free Library has extended its mission with programs like Kids, Community, and Cops, which sets up book exchanges in police departments, and the Action Book Club, which encourages social interaction through shared reading. Todd Bol was an evangelist for books and reading and their power to increase understanding and to bring us together in better communities.

He traveled tirelessly in support of this mission, everywhere from corporate offices to neighborhood schools and churches, a good-natured, talkative, funny guy who had found his calling and who had seen his simple dream take on global proportions. Once he buttonholed you for a conversation, you didn’t leave until you were a believer in that dream too. And a supporter. Before he died, he told the Chicago Sun-Herald, “If I may be so bold, I think I’m the most successful person I know. Because I stimulate fifty-four million books to be read and neighbors to talk to each other. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the very definition of success.”

Honoring Todd

To honor Todd, or to find out more about Little Free Libraries, visit littlefreelibrary.org. You can also read The Little Free Library Book by Margret Aldrich or Little Free Libraries and Tiny Sheds by Philip Schmidt, with a foreword written by Todd H. Bol.

 

 

By Susan Larson (New Orleans)