He was twelve when he started collecting books. By the time he was eighteen, the small free library on his front porch held twenty-one thousand volumes.
The house on Whittington Avenue in Hot Springs had been Lewis Pellam’s grandmother’s house since 1971. It was a small white wood-frame two-story in the small Whittington Park neighborhood, three blocks from the slow careful park itself, with a small wide front porch that ran the full width of the house and that his grandmother had been sitting on most evenings, in a wicker chair with a glass of iced tea, for as long as Lewis had been able to remember.
He had moved into the house in 2017. He had been eight. His mother had been killed in a car accident on Interstate 30 the previous spring. His father had been, by every honest reading of Garland County records, the kind of careful absent father who had not been a piece of Lewis’s life since approximately the spring of 2010. His grandmother — a retired Hot Springs elementary school librarian named Coralie Pellam — had taken him in, by gentle careful private decision, in the slow weeks after his mother’s funeral.
She had been sixty-six at the time. She had raised him, by the steady weather of careful southern Arkansas grandmothers, from the age of eight to the age of twelve, when the project I am writing about properly began.
II. The first shelf.
The Little Free Library on the front porch had been built by his grandfather, who had passed in 2009, in approximately 1986. It had been the kind of wooden box, about the size of a small kitchen cabinet, that had a glass door and a sloped roof and a sign over the top that had read, in his grandfather’s careful blue-paint stencil work, TAKE A BOOK · LEAVE A BOOK · WHITTINGTON AVE PORCH.
His grandmother had kept it stocked, by her own slow patient librarian habit, since 1986. It had held, on any given day, between fourteen and twenty-two careful volumes. The neighborhood had been using it carefully, by the small steady neighborhood pattern, for thirty-six years.
In April of 2021, when Lewis had been twelve, his grandmother had asked him, on a slow Saturday afternoon on the porch, whether he might like to take over the work of stocking it.
He had said yes.
He had not, by his own honest later description in our conversation in August, fully understood what he was saying yes to. He had been twelve. He had been a sixth-grader at the Lakeside Junior High School. He had agreed because his grandmother had asked, and because the Saturday-afternoon shape of the arrangement had felt, by every honest reading of his careful twelve-year-old internal accounting, like a kind thing his grandmother had wanted him to do.
He had begun, by the slow careful gentle instruction of his grandmother over the slow patient subsequent weeks, to learn the work.
The work had three parts. The first part had been the task of sourcing. His grandmother had been getting the books, for thirty-six years, from approximately five sources — the Hot Springs Garland County Library’s quarterly book sale, the estate sales of older neighbors who had passed, the donations of careful neighbors who had simply brought books over, the goodwill of the Hot Springs branch of the Salvation Army that had quietly held aside the donated books for her, and the occasional purchase she had made at the used bookstore on Central Avenue downtown.
The second part had been the task of curating. His grandmother had been, by her careful long librarian habit, choosing the books in a specific way. She had been mixing, on the porch shelves, careful older novels with careful current best-sellers with careful children’s books with careful regional Arkansas history. She had been keeping, by careful long habit, the proportion of approximately one-third children’s books, one-third adult fiction, and one-third nonfiction.
The third part had been the task of restocking. The porch shelf had been, on any given evening, approximately half-empty. The neighborhood had been taking books at the slow careful steady pace of approximately three to five per day. His grandmother had been restocking it, by careful long habit, every Saturday morning before breakfast.
Lewis had taken over the work in April of 2021. He had been twelve.
By June, the porch shelf had grown to two shelves. His grandmother had added the second shelf, by gentle careful arrangement with a neighbor named Mr. Calhoun who did weekend carpentry, in late May.
By September, the porch shelf had grown to four shelves. The sources had grown to approximately twelve.
By December — by the end of his careful sixth-grade year’s first semester — the porch had held approximately three hundred volumes.
He had been thirteen.
III. The next four years.
I want to be careful, in writing the next part, about how I describe the growth between December of 2021 and the summer of 2025 when Lewis Pellam graduated from Lakeside High School. The popular American story of child who builds a project tends to compress the four years into a montage. The actual shape of Lewis Pellam’s four years was not a montage.
It was a slow set of weekly Saturday mornings.
The porch had grown, between December of 2021 and June of 2025, in the slow steady way that porches sometimes grow when children spend almost every Saturday morning for four years working on them. The four shelves had grown to eight. The eight had grown to twelve. By the end of his careful eighth-grade year — June of 2023 — the porch had held approximately three thousand four hundred volumes, arranged on a series of careful custom-built wooden shelves that had taken over both the front porch and the side porch of the Whittington Avenue house.
The sources had grown to approximately forty-eight.
The neighborhood had begun, by approximately the slow careful spring of 2023, to refer to the Pellam house, in the loose neighborhood vernacular, as the Library.
The expansion had continued. By the end of his careful ninth-grade year — June of 2024 — the porch had held approximately nine thousand volumes. The sources had grown to approximately eighty-four. The structure of the project had grown to include a corner of the living room, by gentle careful arrangement with his grandmother, which had become the sorting and shelving area where Lewis spent most of his Saturday mornings.
By the end of his careful tenth-grade year — June of 2025 — the porch had held approximately twenty-one thousand volumes. The sources had grown to approximately a hundred and twenty-two. The structure had grown to include, by careful private arrangement with his grandmother in the spring of 2025, the entirety of the detached two-car garage in the back yard, which had been converted by gentle careful weekend work by Lewis and a rotation of neighborhood volunteers into a annex of the porch library.
The annex was, by the summer of 2025, the primary lending operation. The porch shelf had been, by the gentle return to its original 1986 shape, restored to approximately forty volumes — the kind of curated front-porch selection his grandmother had been maintaining for thirty-six years before he had taken it over.
The difference, by the summer of 2025, was that careful patrons could now walk around to the back yard and select from the entire twenty-one-thousand-volume collection.
IV. The mechanics.
I sat with Lewis Pellam on the front porch of the Whittington Avenue house on a slow Saturday afternoon in early August of this year. He was sixteen. He had just finished his careful tenth-grade year. He was, by every honest later reading of his schedule, doing the work of being a Hot Springs high school junior — careful summer reading, careful summer SAT prep, careful summer track conditioning for the cross-country team — while also doing the daily work of the library.
The daily work of the library had grown, by the summer of 2025, into a operation that required approximately three hours of his time per day during the school year and approximately five hours per day during the summer.
The three hours per day were broken down, by his own honest later description, in the following way.
Approximately one hour was spent on intake — receiving the donations that arrived, by various means, at the Whittington Avenue address. The donations came in three forms. The first was the walk-up donation, in which careful neighbors and careful Hot Springs residents simply brought boxes of books and left them on the front porch. The second was the scheduled pickup, in which Lewis or one of his volunteers drove the family Honda Civic to donor locations to collect larger donations. The third was the institutional donation, in which Hot Springs-area institutions — the library system, two local schools, the Salvation Army, the used bookstore on Central Avenue — held aside institutional donations for monthly pickup.
Approximately one hour was spent on sorting and shelving. The sorting work involved classifying incoming books into approximately fourteen categories — children’s, young-adult, adult fiction, adult nonfiction, regional Arkansas, history, biography, reference, poetry, drama, and several careful subcategories of children’s. The shelving work involved placing sorted books onto the appropriate shelf in the detached garage annex.
Approximately one hour was spent on patron service. The annex was, by careful Lewis’s gentle Saturday-and-Sunday-afternoon shifts and by gentle careful evening shifts during the school year, open to patrons for approximately twenty hours per week. The patron service involved helping careful patrons find books, answering questions, recommending books, and the general kind of work that neighborhood library volunteers do.
The three hours per day were, by Lewis’s honest description, the kind of careful three hours per day that a sixteen-year-old could fit into a Hot Springs high school schedule if the sixteen-year-old was disciplined.
He had been, by his own honest later description, disciplined.
V. The volunteers.
By the summer of 2025, the operation had grown beyond what Lewis could manage alone. He had organized, by the slow patient work of the previous two years, a network of approximately twenty-two careful neighborhood volunteers. The volunteers ranged in age from seven — a neighbor’s daughter named Lila who had been helping with the children’s section since she had been six — to eighty-three — a retired University of Arkansas English professor named Dr. Eleanor Carraway, who had moved to Hot Springs in 2019 and who had been doing the adult-fiction curation work since the spring of 2023.
The volunteers had organized themselves, by Lewis’s gentle careful private leadership, into approximately five careful working groups — the intake group, the sorting group, the shelving group, the patron-service group, and the special-projects group. The special-projects group had been, by approximately the spring of 2024, the group that handled the kind of new initiatives that the library had begun to take on as it had grown.
The initiatives had included a weekly Wednesday-evening reading group, a monthly Saturday children’s story hour, a seasonal book-recommendation newsletter that went out to approximately a hundred and forty careful Hot Springs subscribers, and a annual end-of-summer book swap that the library hosted in the Pellam back yard.
The volunteers were, by Lewis’s gentle direct description in our conversation, the reason the operation had been able to grow. He had not, by his honest later admission, ever attempted to claim any sole credit for the work. He had been, by his own description, the piece of infrastructure that had been organizing it. The work itself had been, by every honest reading of every careful volunteer interview I had conducted, the work of a community.
The honest difference between a child’s project and a neighborhood institution is the presence, somewhere around year three, of an older retired English professor who has begun to take the adult-fiction curation seriously.
VI. Coralie.
I sat with Coralie Pellam on the front porch of the Whittington Avenue house on the same Saturday afternoon I had sat with Lewis. She was seventy-four. She had been a retired Hot Springs elementary school librarian for fourteen years. She had been the grandmother of Lewis Pellam for sixteen years, since the month of his birth in 2009.
She did not, in our conversation, characterize the library project in any conventional language. She characterized it the way a retired southern Arkansas elementary school librarian would characterize it.
“Sweetheart,” she said. “The work was the work. I had been doing the porch shelf since 1986. I asked Lewis whether he wanted to take it over in April of 2021 because I had been watching him for almost a year and I had recognized, by my honest careful long librarian instinct, that he was the kind of boy who needed a project. He had been, by my honest reading at the time, the kind of careful twelve-year-old who had been carrying the weight of his mother’s death without yet having a place to put it. The work of the porch was, by my honest later admission, the place I was trying to give him to put it.”
She paused. She drank her iced tea.
“He took it,” she said. “And he made it, by the slow patient work of his careful four years, into the place. The place is now the library. The library is, by every honest reading of the summer of 2025, the place where his mother’s death has gone. It is also, by every honest reading, the place where the Whittington Park neighborhood has been quietly going. The book collection is the book collection. The place is the place. The work is the work.”
She paused again.
“And the boy,” she said, “is the boy his mother would have wanted him to be.”
VII. Lewis.
I asked Lewis, near the end of our August conversation, what he was going to do after he finished high school.
He thought about it for almost a full minute.
“I do not know yet,” he said. “I have been thinking about library science. I have been thinking about education. I have been thinking about journalism. I have been thinking about the kind of nonprofit work that several careful older Hot Springs residents who have come through the library have told me they think I would be good at.”
He paused.
“What I know for sure,” he said, “is that I am not going to leave the library. The library is going to need a succession plan if I go to college outside of Hot Springs. The succession plan is, by my gentle private decision in late June, going to be Dr. Eleanor Carraway.”
He paused again.
“Dr. Carraway has agreed,” he said. “She has been doing the adult-fiction curation work for two and a half years. She has been, by every honest reading of every careful volunteer, the most natural successor. She has also told me — Mr. Reeve, she has told me very directly — that she would only take the directorship if I were going to remain involved as the founder. The arrangement we have agreed to, by gentle joint conversation in early July, is that I will be the founder-emeritus from wherever I am in college, and that Dr. Carraway will be the operating director on the ground in Hot Springs.”
He looked at the porch shelf in front of him. The shelf held, that Saturday afternoon, approximately thirty-eight volumes — the kind of careful curated selection his grandmother had been keeping for thirty-six years.
“The porch shelf,” he said, “stays. The annex grows. The work continues.”
VIII. Why it stays.
I sat with Lewis and Coralie together on the porch in the slow careful late-afternoon Arkansas light, which had been turning, by the late-summer schedule, the particular kind of careful golden that the Hot Springs afternoons sometimes take on in early August. The porch shelf had been visited, in the ninety minutes we had been sitting on the porch, by four neighborhood patrons — an older man in a straw hat, a young mother with two careful small children, a teenage girl on a blue bicycle, and a older woman with a golden retriever.
None of them had paid any specific attention to the sixteen-year-old in the chair on the porch. They had simply, by the long Whittington Park neighborhood habit, taken a book each, looked at it, considered, returned it to the shelf if they had decided not, and selected another. The older woman with the golden retriever had taken two careful books and had carried them, with a gentle wave at Coralie, down the sidewalk in the slow careful direction of her house three doors down.
The library is, by every honest reading of the summer of 2025, the library.
The boy is, by every honest reading of the sixteen years of his careful life, the boy his mother would have wanted him to be.
Across the United States, in front-porch shelves and detached two-car garages and neighborhoods that have been quietly building informal lending libraries for forty years, the work of careful children and careful grandmothers is being quietly done in the slow careful Saturday-morning rhythm that informal libraries require. Most of these libraries will, in any practical sense, never reach the twenty-one-thousand-volume scale that the Pellam library has reached. A handful of them, by the patience of careful twelve-year-olds who have been given projects by their careful retired-librarian grandmothers in the spring of their careful seventh-grade year, will. For broader context on the long American history of informal community-library work and the available infrastructure of neighborhood literacy, readers can spend time with the materials at the Library of Congress or the long-form material at the Smithsonian Magazine. The Chapbook keeps its narratives clean, human, and responsible — read more in the Editorial Policy.
The porch shelf is, this evening, still on the front porch of the Whittington Avenue house. The annex is open, by gentle Saturday-and-Sunday-afternoon schedule, in the detached garage in the back yard. The sixteen-year-old founder is, by his own gentle careful arrangement with himself, planning to spend the evening doing his careful summer SAT prep.
The work, in the slow patient honest way of southern Arkansas Saturday afternoons, continues.
