Welcome! The Hayworth Little Free Library is an informal community book exchange located in the Faircrest Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. We’ve created and maintained this space since 2014 so that neighbors, students, and visitors to the neighborhood can share books in an array of different genres, both for adults and for younger readers.
Do you see a title that interests you? Take it! There is no due date. After you’ve read it, we encourage you to bring the book back, lend it to a friend, or otherwise keep it in circulation. If you have other books you would like to make available to local readers, you’re invited to add them to the Library’s ever-churning collection.
If space allows, yes, please! Most or perhaps all of the books on offer here were left by Library patrons like yourself. We thank you for your generous contributions of books to the Library!
We ask that you limit your donations to paperback and hardcover books, and that you only add books to the Library if and when there’s available shelf space to accommodate them. Please place books in the library with spines (as opposed to front covers) facing outward. Please be gentle; we occasionally have had to repair the Library’s rear plexiglass window after a patron has broken it overzealously trying to cram books onto a shelf.
To maximize the space available for books, we do not include newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, tracts, advertisements, or other media on our shelves. We reserve the right to remove any materials we don’t feel are appropriate, and we also cull books when the Library gets overcrowded.
From time to time, someone will bring a large box (or even multiple boxes) of books, and leave them on the sidewalk in the vicinity of the Library. We appreciate the spirit of generosity, but again ask that you only give as many books as the available shelf space inside the cabinet permits. We encourage patrons to think of the Library as a place where they might share with interested neighbors those one or two books they're really excited about having someone else read, rather than as a dumping ground for all those books they no longer want in the house.
We encourage you to place books intended for younger readers on the left half of the bottom shelf, where they’ll be easily found and readily in reach.
To ensure that the Library can offer a diverse array of books to a diverse array of readers, please be mindful that shelf-space is limited and meant to be shared. Contribute no more than a few books from your collection at any one time. Don’t stock the Library with multiple copies of the same title. And please contribute books written by authors other than yourself.
Please only leave books in the Library. We do not include other types of reading material — e.g., old newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, tracts, leaflets, advertisements, etc. — on our shelves. Nor do we include other sundry stuff. We sometimes find videotapes, CDs, DVDs, board games, puzzles, and other miscellaneous knick-knacks people have left in here. (Perhaps the oddest thing someone once left in the Library was a half-eaten jar of peanut butter.) We clear out all such items out to ensure room for books.
The Hayworth Little Free Library was built and is curated by the family of Callahan, Dionne, and Luna. You can write to us with questions or suggestions at Callahan@outlook.com. The vast bulk of the books herein have been contributed by the public, though, so we cannot vouch for the merit of the titles on offer, nor do the available books necessarily reflect our views or reading preferences. We tend not to be heavy-handed in our curation, but we retain and occasionally exercise the right to remove any materials we’d rather not have on display at our home.
Over the decade that we’ve maintained this Library, our family has built and rebuilt the physical cabinet containing it several times, as the Library’s popularity necessitated expansion and as older cabinets sustained damage. The current incarnation is, we think, the most sturdy and attractive one to date, thanks largely to the labors and carpentry skills of Callahan’s parents, Jim and Debby Callahan. Much kudos, gratitude, and love to them for all their work helping to bang this box together.
We often have a surplus of garden vegetables or of lemons, and will leave some produce (or, on occasion, some seedlings) out by the Library to share. Please help yourself and enjoy. Our raised garden bed in the parkway, though, isn’t intended for public harvest.
Ours is part of a loose international network of Little Free Libraries. For more information about Little Free Libraries and other LFL locations, visit www.littlefreelibrary.org.