The literary hubs are ‘coral reefs for communities’ in Victoria
Photo courtesy of Teale Phelps Bondaroff.
On July 20, community members gathered in Rutledge Park to celebrate the Greater Victoria Placemaking Network’s (GVPN) tenth anniversary. Founded in 2013, the non-profit is run by a small team of volunteers aiming “to inspire people, neighbourhoods, and communities to create vibrant public places that promote health, happiness, and well-being,” according to a press release.
During the celebration, the GVPN delivered their 100 000th book for the Pocket Places Project, a 2017 initiative they began to promote, map, build, and stock Little Free Libraries around the CRD.
“They come in all shapes and sizes,” said Teale Phelps Bondaroff, Pocket Places lead. “The biggest one in town can hold about 300 or 400 books, and the smallest one barely holds one.” There are even specialized libraries, including one in Bastion Square for French books.
“Our initial efforts were to … identify a spot downtown or elsewhere that was neglected, or underwhelming, or not very well designed [and] put together some ideas of what could be done to improve it,” GVPN President Ray Straatsma told the Martlet of the little libraries project.
After asking the community for suggestions for what the 100 000th book should be, the GVPN selected Hand Drawn Victoria by Canadian artist and author Emma FitzGerald.
Photo courtesy of Teale Phelps Bondaroff.
“We thought this [was] a really good book that exemplifies placemaking, because she’s celebrating place through her amazing drawings and art,” explained Phelps Bondaroff in an interview with the Martlet.
When he first got involved with the GVPN, Phelps Bondaroff and his partner helped improve the accuracy of the Little Free Libraries map by pinpointing 111 of them that were unlisted in the region.
Currently, the map, which is available online on the GVPN’s website for anyone to access, has 850 Little Free Libraries for books, 28 for seeds and plants, and 21 for puzzles and board games. Since 2017, they have also helped build over 120 new libraries.
“We have an amazing team of volunteers who will often just go out and top up little libraries of their own volition,” said Phelps Bondaroff. Some even go into the community to find “wild little libraries” that have not been mapped.
“The thing I love about Little Free Libraries is, in addition to sharing books, they’re all about placemaking,” Phelps Bondaroff shared. “Placemaking is softening the hard edges of the city through the way we design public spaces, and it’s really transformative.”
Little Free Libraries often become a community hub in neighborhoods. “You often will bump into people at them and have great conversations,” Phelps Bondaroff explained. “I always describe them as coral reefs for communities because people swim around them like fish.”
Jessica Hum, a Little Free Librarian who has volunteered with the GVPN since 2021, notes how much people reuse these libraries.
Photo courtesy of Teale Phelps Bondaroff.
“What I witness is people of all ages coming to the library,” Hum told the Martlet. “Sometimes my library is even full of books I’ve already put in there and someone has borrowed and they’ve brought back, so it’s a circular borrowing economy.”
Little Free Libraries have a positive impact on communities, fostering literacy and connectedness. Hum told the Martlet that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when public libraries restricted access to their materials, Little Free Libraries “started to fill a void where people could just access books in any way.”
To date, the Pocket Places Project has now delivered 104 972 books, including 19 062 in 2024, and are currently organizing a ribbon cutting ceremony for the 850th Little Free Library in the CRD.
If you know of a Little Free Library missing from the GVPN’s interactive map, you can apply to add it using a form on their website.
Want to explore the Little Free Libraries around Greater Victoria? Try Little Free Library Bingo! Created by John Threlfall, a local writer, arts advocate and community builder (and Martlet alum), the bingo cards are available to download on the GVPN’s website.
