Portland Haiku Dispensary

I love all the Little Free Libraries in my neighborhood. There’s so much joy and character in these little boxes of books.

My only complaint is that the joy and character tends to stop at the box itself.

When you visit someone’s house for the first time, part of the fun comes from discovering parts of their character hinted at by the things—the books and music and movies and paintings—they choose to keep. There’s usually none of that in these little libraries. The books in them tend to be castaways, both by the hosts and their visitors. Danielle Steel and John Grisham. Some old Highlights. Biographies of people you’ve never heard of. Self-published thrillers. Drumming For Dummies. What am I supposed do with these?

The Library

So for mine I chose to focus on haiku. I’ve grown a collection of books and journals over the years and, as much as I’ve loved every one of them, I don’t need to keep them all. Better to share the love.

But sometimes, as a visitor to one of these libraries, you don’t really want to commit to a book. Sometimes you just want a memento. For times like these, you can take one of the cards we’ve printed.

We’ve only printed three so far but more will be coming soon. The most popular (by a small margin) has featured a classic by Bob Boldman:

walking with the river
the water does my thinking

I have the say, the experience with this dispensary has been more emotional than I expected. Some of the highs and lows:

The day I put out the first batch of books—about 25 books, about 80% collections, 20% journals, all from the past three years—they were stolen. I’m pretty sure as retaliation by one of the drug dealers that was living in a camper across the street.

Jim Kacian of The Haiku Foundation very generously sent a big box of books to help restock the library.

Dan Peccia of Poetry Pottery agreed to a commission for a sign and, as payment, wanted some poems. I ended up compiling and printing a book for him (and printing a few extra copies to make the price agreeable), which was so much fun.

Someone left a nice note in the box, so happy that she had found the dispensary, and asking about local haiku groups.

Then, yesterday, someone backed their car into the box, breaking its base and door and Dan’s sign. (Of course they didn’t leave a note.) I’ll probably be able to repair it but it won’t be a quick fix.

This project is a labor of love. It’s nice that people are responding positively to it—people stop by every day, books cycle through, and the cards keep disappearing. But I’m doing it primarily because it’s fun. Picking books and poems to share with people is fun. Designing and printing things is fun. Meeting people is fun. And writing software is fun, too.

The Tech

Of course the dispensary needed a website.

The software side of this project involves an admin system and a static site generator.

The admin system is just some PHP to interface with a SQLite database. Pretty standard stuff. I made it so I can add poems to the database whenever and wherever I find them.

The static site generator interfaces with the same database but it’s written in Gerbil Scheme, which has become my go-to language for personal projects. It’s just such a fun language. It’s essentially a thick layer of modern features and libraries over Gambit, which contains its own set of niceties, including an optimizing compiler. Actually, I’m thinking of retiring Specs and rewriting this site’s generator in Gerbil. (Which might qualify as a hamster wheel project.) Anyway, if you haven’t tried with yet, I’d highly recommend it.