That book sitting on the table, the one by the window at the cafe on the corner. It was not left there by accident. Neither was the book hanging by a string in the phone booth. Or the one propped open on the park bench.
The books were left there for you or for someone like you. So pick one up. Take it home. Give the book a read or at least a look. Write down what you think. And pass it along.
This is what the Free Book movement is all about–“to liberate books and seduce minds.”
Started in Mexico by a group called Flying Letters, Libro Libre is a simpler, mostly Latin American version of BookCrossing, the U.S.-based movement that has European roots and that has blossomed to include more than 400,000 people around the world. Libro Libre has grown in three years to about 20,000 participants in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Brazil and elsewhere.
The idea is simple: Every 7th day of the month, participants place a book somewhere in the public space. In the book, they have written a dedication, some of which are personal and some explaining the cause. They have jotted down an e-mail address, and they leave it all behind with the hope that the person who grabs the book will in turn be grabbed by it before putting it back in circulation.
The love of books and their power to shape lives imbue the effort, and it fills the testimonials that people post to the Libro Libre Web site.
Damaris Acevedo talked of feeling dizzy with excitement upon hearing of the movement. The only cure was to shout it to friends and start hanging posters advertising Libro Libre at the university in the central Argentine city of Cordoba where Acevedo is a student.
Taken to days of young love
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Pablo Taboada Toledano said he came upon a Free Book the night his car was stolen in Mexico City. Having found a phone booth to call the police, he also found a book of short stories. While waiting to file the reports, Taboada Toledano was transported to his days of young love.
“Of course, in a strict economic sense, the value of a book does not compare with that of a car,” he wrote to Libro Libre. “But finding that copy in my anguished moments reinforced in my spirit the conviction that all is not so bad in the world. So I found in the telephone booth something more valuable than the lost car.”
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The president of Letras Voladoras, or Flying Letters, in Mexico City, Jose Salgado, said his group aims “to rescue the intellectual written work from the worst of all ends–oblivion.”
“A kept book is like a medicine that does not cure,” Salgado writes.
The movement coincides with efforts by Latin American governments to increase literacy and encourage reading. The Mexico City government gives out books on the Metro subway system, for example. Buenos Aires is doing the same in taxis.
But such governmental programs often become politicized. Libro Libre, like BookCrossing in the United States, is studiously non-governmental and non-commercial.
The group has a fan in Lorenzo Amengual, who rhapsodized about coming across a book by the late Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo. Writing in the Buenos Aires magazine Debate, Amengual recalled how once upon a time in a Buenos Aires bar he stumbled upon a Vallejo book.
He also stumbled upon the woman, “fascinating for her intelligence and beauty,” who owned it.
Alluding to a Vallejo line about dying in a Paris downpour, Amengual reminisced that the encounter and the Vallejo book, which did not come free that day, helped shape his life.
“I learned that beyond dying in a real or a literary sense, one can enjoy many other memorable things while it rains,” he wrote. “In Paris or here.”
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Colin McMahon is the Tribune’s South America correspondent.