This writing life

Recently, Little Free Libraries have been popping up around town. They look like duplex birdhouses on posts, planted on people’s lawns, fronting their sidewalks. The idea is that someone puts a book in; someone takes a book out.

Cool! I thought. I will put a book in. And not just any book, but a pristine, mint-condition copy of The Best Ride to New York, about which, in 1978, the Sunday Times admiringly remarked, “What is one to say about Bob Levin’s . . . ”; and, only two dozen years later, the Daily News lamented its having been “lost . . . [and] forgotten.”

Well shit, hardly! I know its whereabouts exactly. As soon as my publisher notified me that tax consequences had condemned my unsold stock to the shredder, I bought boxes. They have been in our basement ever since.

Actually, first they were in the garage. Then we got a call from a construction foreman who, upon his arrival at work, had found 40 copies strewn around his job site. It seemed someone, while helping himself to the garden tools, had walked off with a carton-full. Then he’d expressed his disagreement with the critical judgment of the Times by ridding himself of my oeuvre at his first opportunity. The foreman had found me in the phone book, so I signed a copy for him.

But I digress. As I was saying, Little Free Libraries . . . . I taped cards with my e-mail address to copies, placed them in boxes, and awaited feedback.

Diggers redux

Then I expanded my potential network.

A couple weeks earlier, the San Francisco Chronicle had reported a Free Book Store, on San Pablo Avenue, in El Cerrito. (The Diggers live, I’d thought at the news.) People donate books; people take them — up to 100 at a time, 25 for children. Each book is stamped “Free. Not to be Resold.” Residents of a nearby homeless encampment were observed in the aisles with shopping carts. I decided to begin by donating 20 card-carrying Best Rides. If they were snapped up. . . .

The store is open Saturdays and Sundays, in a shabby commercial strip of single-story buildings, liquor stores and tanning salons, Chinese restaurants and tattoo parlors, with a shared sense of dreams unrealized among them. Inside, books spread across tables, overflowed boxes, crammed onto shelves, filled the air with the collected mustiness from many homes’ back rooms. Some — David Halberstam’s The Fifties, Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay — I’d paid good money for and read. Others — David Talbot’s Brothers, Tom Wicker’s A Time to Die — I had abandoned after failed beginnings. But there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds — hard covers and soft, best sellers and nullities, each no less than Best Ride a product of fantasy and hope, financial temptation and wooings of the bitch goddess — upon whom I would have never considered laying a finger.

“Is that you?”

A half-dozen shoppers navigated the selections. A white-haired woman, leaning on a walker, shrewdly debated the literary merit of Sue Grafton with a friend. An Asian woman surveyed the Young Adults. Discernment weighed against opportunity, and judgment tempered gratitude.

I had deposited my box, I hoped, while no one was looking. (No chance anyone will recognize me from the jacket photo, I figured. Usually it drew a smile and an “Is that you?") After a few minutes, a stocky woman with a platinum blonde buzz-cut appeared out of the shop’s shadowy rear. She stamped each book and returned it to the box. She placed the box at the end of a row of shelves as if its contents were identical apples available for plucking.

Competition will be fierce, but it will only take one movie producer, ducking in out of the rain after his tattoo and tan, with or without a shopping cart, to turn things around.

For Roz Warren's thoughts about a writer's self-promotion, click here.