When was the last time you used a telephone booth to make a phone call? When was the last time you went to a telephone booth to check out a book or drop off one you recently finished?
Aside from the Superman movies, telephone booths never became quite as iconic as the lovely red booths in England. Indeed, the red booth is very near and dear to their national consciousness, so what do you do when they are made almost entirely obsolete by the cell phone? Send them to the dump?
In a couple of places in England communities have actually transformed their telephone booths into micro-community lending libraries–click >>HERE<<. Given that the bus stop in front of the Bakery is a significant transit node, why not encourage reading, bring a little joy to commuters’ faces and begin to establish the Old Bakery as a place of sharing by setting up a similar micro-book sharing library? Don’t you think that La Boite customers might similarly enjoy a random book with their meal?
No telephone booth at hand? Not a problem. Some communities have similarly converted old newspaper boxes while others have made stand-alone nooks such as this one– click >>HERE<<.
With the main library going through a transition, what if we had a design competition for iconic micro-book sharing libraries and set them up around Downtown Austin or at other major bus stops?
