[email protected]
610 869 4712
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Street Road
725 Street Road Cochranville, PA 19330 

The Little Free Library
1016B Gap Newport Pike 
Cochranville, PA 19330
part of the ongoing series 
Summer Library​
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Closing Event 
November 13, 2021
4:30pm - until the fire is out

and, join us earlier, at 3:30pm, for a performance of 
Composting Hegel.
See full details about the Summer Library 2021 project, including other Librarians' work, here. The next iteration of this project, the Winter Library, is here. 
Details from L. Florence's Anti-Anthropocene Compost, part of her Librarianship. 

The Anti-Anthropocene Bonfire Book-burning

In connection with Laura Florence's librarianship, she invites our other Summer Librarians, as well as you, the public, to join us in November, for a return, and a closing. 
A coda to her library, this event also serves as a closing reception for the Summer Library project, and a gathering for considering together our relationships to books and libraries, literal, figurative, and unknown. Laura writes:

Fire is a sacred element. It can purify, transport, and transform. It changes to ash and ash in turn nourishes the Earth. It offers warmth and light, it invites enchantment, calls together community and draws us into natural ceremony. 

The Anti-Anthropocene Bonfire book-burning explores burning as an act of celebration, reclamation, and lovingly returning to Earth the materials that were extracted in the making of books.

Books are human-made objects—both in their numinous use of words to describe the world and create new realities and in their physical form as paper products. They are often cherished for their meaningful contents, for their ability to transport, enlighten, enliven, expand our ways of understanding and to prompt us to think, imagine, wonder, expand. They connect us, define us, embellish us, support us, confirm us.

This book-burning also proffers opportunity to purge the world of texts that promote hate and injury. It attempts to change by the alchemical force of fire the vile into the pure. This book-burning acknowledges the many instances book-burning has been used as a tool throughout history and contemporarily for cultural, intellectual, spiritual harm. It is a true wish that this book-burning can refute to some degree such acts of violence.

Books are manufactured objects that require large quantity of paper (trees), chemicals, water, petroleum, electricity to produce. Shipping them to us (the book store, the library, the front door) requires further consumption of fuels, metals, plastics, electricity, cardboard (more trees). Once acquired, we are faced at some point with how to respectfully dispose of them. They will arrive at someone’s feet, given over to someone else’s responsibility. They are the battered, moldy, out-of-date books, tired classics, required assigned school books, the pulp-fiction, the water-stained cookbooks, the yellowed home-repair manuals, the bulky textbooks, and the many, many, many encyclopedias—all deserve a finer send off than the landfill where they will almost never disintegrate. 

The Anti-Anthropocene Bonfire is an opportunity to release and relinquish the gifts we have been given, held as precious and are ready to return to Earth. Books, words, thoughts, facts and figures, pains and pleasures, memories and wishes…all are invited to bring to the fire what you wish to gift back to the fire as the final incarnation and incantation of the incendiery Summer Library (library being ultimately the holder, keeper, organizer of what we hold to be meaningful and worthy).

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VISITING
Please check our website or social media before visiting as our hours are subject to change.

Street Road HOURS
Autumn 2024 hours info: Our hours are currently by appointment, in person or virtually. 
We can accommodate most times, given advance notice. 
And, stop by if you see a car outside!
Email us or phone to set up a visit

Little Free Library - Fall 2024 HOURS
Mondays 6-9pm
Wednesdays 6-9pm
Thursdays 12-4pm
Fridays 10am-2pm
Saturdays 10am-2pm
and by appointment.
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Our Little Free Library outdoor boxes at both sites are open 24/7 and are regularly restocked.

Please call 610-869-4712 or email to set up visits outside our regularly scheduled hours. 
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We are currently seeking volunteers for both locations: email us to enquire. We look forward to hearing from you!

DIRECTIONS
to Street Road here.
to The Little Free Library here.

A word about 'here':
We acknowledge that we are on the ancestral lands of the Lenape, original people of the mid-Atlantic area, forced west by British and US governments. Most Delaware Indian tribe descendants are now located in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario. Lenni Lenapes in Pennsylvania are not officially recognized as tribes by the United States, though an estimated 5000 Lenape Nation descendants live in the Delaware River area. We pay respects to the Lenape people both past and present. Please consider the many legacies of violence, displacement and settlement that form part of our collective histories. While increased public recognition of these legacies and processes of redress such as Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission are positive steps, concrete focus on return of land and land rights remains a distant horizon.
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