Johnny Blue Eyes Memorial Little Free Library #57600

Free book exchange where you can take a book, leave a book or both! Library Steward is Tara Jill. Little Free Library Number 57600 is a Little Free Library in New Orleans, Louisiana. For those who don't know, Johnny "Blue Eyes" Pretasky was my boyfriend. He died on April 11, 2017. He had promised to build me a Little Free Library, and there were so many books we'd talked about lending one another.

I decided that since he promised to build me a Little Free Library and can't do that now, I'd build one for his books. So that's where his books and my books and all the other books anyone wants to put in the LFL will go. I could tell you all about how long I’d been wanting to make a Little Free Library, how I’d see Little Free Libraries when I walked around town and loved the idea of filling a handmade little house with all the books I love. How I was a lonely kid and a lonelier young adult and that books were sometimes my only friends. How I’d written books but wasn’t a famous successful writer and published zines, saved zines my friends made, treasured these items and with certain books wanted to share them with complete strangers but never knew who to give them to. I could explain that books, and writing, have probably saved my life more times than I can count. I could describe my apartment and the shelves and piles of books and mention that I majored in English and have a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing and teach English at multiple colleges. I could explain the day a room full of books was shipped to one of the universities at which I sometimes teach, and the hallway by the English and Philosophy department hallways were filled with boxes of books. An alumni had passed away in a far away place, and in his last will and testament, he’d requested his books be donated to the university. The faculty were not sure what to do with those books but mentioned the potential for an internship involving students building Little Free Libraries. “Oh really?” I asked. “I’ve been wanting to build one of those,“ I said. The Philosophy professor, whose name I can’t recall, invited me to take a box or two of books for my own Little Free Library. I told Johnny all those things, and at one point asked if he knew anyone I could hire to build a Little Free Library. "Nobody should have to pay for a Little Free Library," he told me. He was adamant that building a Little Free Library was the kind of project he wished he had time to work on, and sometimes when he'd be driving around with me in his truck, we'd see Little Free Libraries on the side of the road and talk about them.



~ Tara Jill