There is a place near the path I walk in the mornings, where people drop off books.
It’s a free library of sorts. A sort of “leave a penny, take a penny” for literature. It’s usually full of magazines from the past few months, dropped off by travelers who’ve read them and don’t want to take them home with them. There are often a couple books: some romance paperbacks, maybe a hardcover nonfiction book on some esoteric subject.
But every few weeks, whole shelves’ worth of books appear. Hardcover, paperback, genre fiction, literary fiction… It’s as if a book dam somewhere has broken, and this is the resulting flood.
I always wonder what the story is behind these occasional floods. Are the books from a library, cleaning off its shelves? Or is it a retired widower who loves to read but lives in an apartment too small to keep any but his most precious books in it. Maybe they don’t come from a single source, but a traveling troupe of readers. They work their way from one book-drop to the next, picking up new titles and dropping off old ones en masse, like a swarm of pollinating bees.
