For more than two years now, Tony Bol and his wife Eden Penn have made wooden boxes for people who want to install them in their front yards to share something: books, food, seeds. Even poetry.
The idea might sound familiar. It was Tony's late brother, Todd, who hammered together a tiny library and planted it in his Hudson, Wis., front yard more than a decade ago, creating the Little Free Library movement.
What has happened since then has been one unexpected turn after another, none of it foreseeable, said Susan Bol, Todd's wife.
"He didn't expect this to be a big deal at all," she said.
It's been three years since Todd's death from pancreatic cancer. An idealist and romantic who saw the little wooden boxes as a solution to society's ills, Bol made his first box using wood from an old garage door. He installed it in his front yard and didn't think it would become much more than what he intended: a tribute to his mother. Then a neighbor held a garage sale in 2010, drawing people to the Bols' dead-end street.
"People were really looking at that library," laughed Susan. Spurred on by word-of-mouth advertising, Bol initially wanted to build 2,150, to beat the number of Carnegie libraries in the United States. The movement long ago surpassed that mark.
Last year, the Little Free Library nonprofit organization, based in Hudson, Wis., announced that it had donated its 100,000th library, a box that went to the Association for the Advancement of Mexican Americans in Houston.
Todd created the nonprofit, and Tony ran it briefly after his brother's death. He had worked there for about five years, but in late 2018 Tony struck out on his own to create a box-making company called Share With Others, based in the Bols' hometown of Stillwater.