Everyone should be a Book Thing regular

The year is 2016. The dominance of the eBook is in its twilight years. Amazon has outcompeted thousands of brick and mortar book stores. Used books are resurging and the publishing market is in utter chaos.

But disregard all of that. In a small and unassuming concrete building painted one part pastel pink and the other pastel blue just a few blocks east of the Homewood campus, The Book Thing has a fundamentally different approach toward the commodification of books.

Founded in 1999 by former bartender Russell Wattenburg, The Book Thing serves as a way to connect people who want to donate their books to people who want to read them. Originally the concept was to benefit teachers who found it difficult to get any kind of reading material into the hands of their often impoverished students. Now it serves as a resource in the Charles Village community that is almost completely unique in its function.

The Book Thing is essentially a warehouse-sized sidewalk library. Anyone is free to take as many books as they can carry, pack or haul with the golden caveat that no money is to be exchanged for any of the services. This also applies to the resale of books taken from the Book Thing. It’s absolutely not allowed.

This is all based on the honor system: Take what you need and donate what you don’t. There are as many as 150,000 volumes each day. All the workers are volunteers. It is an anomaly in a world that seems to revolve around assigning monetary value to anything that we can possibly consume. And it is a resource that Hopkins students should by all means be taking advantage of.

Walking through The Book Thing for the first time can be an overwhelming experience. The dim lights, overflowing bookshelves and truly diverse clientele will be so much that you will forget that “old book smell” is a cliché. Whether you realize it or not the cognitive process that is ingrained from childhood of things costing money will be obsolete for as long you are in the building. It is a process that requires a bit of weaning off of, however, as it takes a few minutes to actually build up the courage to take something off of a shelf. But you’ll get the hang of it.

The selection is varied and will be different every single time you go because there is a constant stream of books entering and leaving. And the place is open every weekend from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. This includes holidays, snowstorms and any apocalyptic cataclysms that could possibly envelop Baltimore.

Here’s a bit more on the mental shift that has to take place in order to properly experience The Book Thing: Specific titles that you have in mind, unless those titles happen to be Twilight or The Da Vinci Code, will almost never be found. The search is part of the appeal. Because you don’t have to consider the price in determining if you want a book, you’ll realize that it’s easier to just go on a whim. Vaguely recognize an author’s name? Give them a try. Like the cover art? Put it in your bag. If you don’t like it, bring it back next time you visit. A really strong gut reaction to the opening sentence of a novel that appears to about an anthropomorphic dolphin? Perhaps the prose is strong and you could learn something.

On Saturday mornings you’ll find a line of cultish, die-hard Book Thingers ready to fill boxes and boxes of Tom Clancy and guides to clinical oncology. But the crowd will die down and you’ll get to see people of all races, genders and ages filing in and out of the building with perhaps their next favorite book. The next time Hopkins feels insular, take a walk to The Book Thing and take advantage of a celebrated local service that is distinctly Baltimore.