Honey, I shrunk the library!

For all you naysayers out there who thought a mislaid British telephone box couldn’t double as a book exchange, meet Book Booth. The brainchild of Clinton Corners, NY natives Claudia Cooley and Terry Sennet, Book Booth will feature a range of titles and will function as a satellite of the city’s public library. The Huffington Post talked with Cooley:

I read the BBC news every morning and this little story caught my eye back in the fall of ’09: A small village in Somerset village of Westbury-sub-Mendip participated in a challenge of what to do with an old phone box. What started as an afternoon tea party, soon became a Gin & Tonic party and someone had a stroke of genius of adding a bookcase, and viola! The Red Phone Box Library was born. Since then, villages are able to buy their phone box for 1 UKP from British Telephone and they have upcycled into libraries/book exchanges/art galleries/tourist booths and even a pub.
I knew that across town, where an English Tea shop was located before, stood an English phone booth and thought, "One day, I’m going to turn that into a book exchange."

The Book Booth officially opened its doors this month, boasting 24-hour access, energy-efficient lighting, and plans for a community bookshare system:

One thing on the horizon, we would like to keep a clipboard in the booth for requests. This is the part that I’m most excited about. On the clipboard, you’ll write your name and a specific interest you have, say like “Turkish Cooking”, the next visitor will look at all the requests and say, “Oh cool, I’ve got a book on Turkish cooking," they’ll write their name down next to it with an approximate date they’ll drop it off. It’s my hope that this unique aspect will lift the veil of anonymity that we live in.

Read more about it here!