Booked out: a late call for phone kiosks

March 12, 2024, 12:30 pm , by Richard Lutz

There it sits…forlorn, forgotten. A typical unused British phone booth. But, writes Richard Lutz, inside, it’s a …..

…a trove of books. Thrillers, history, biogs, kids’ storybooks, romances, cookbooks, beach reads, even a hardback edition of local Ayrshire parish records. And it’s all free.

How’d it happen? Well, British Telecom owns alot of these redundant kiosks that are hardly used, barely maintained, sometimes vandalised but mostly silent and ignored. There’s a regulatory guarantee that the booths will be kept live for remote communities; if there’s a lack of signal networks; or, near accident blackspots.

But otherwise, with 96% of adults hooked into their mobiles, there’s little need for the iconic red boxes. So, volunteers from my Ayrshire village bought our kiosk for a £1, got it up to scratch with a lick of paint, locally made stained glass, kitted it with shelving and asked folks to bring and exchange. And they do.

So, voila, a free store for those who like nothing better than to browse, find a book to dive into and hopefully bring something along to offer up. And, as for offering up, I keep a patient beady eye on the little nook where I leave my own donations. Many happily disappear. But why hasn’t anyone picked up that gossip infested story of crazed Hollywood boss Daryl Zanuck? Or let the Val McDermid novel left to sit? Or that Graham Greene masterpiece, for that matter? They’re gems. And as for those annals of Ayrshire parish records…well, who knows?

There’s only one informal phone box rule and I have to say it’s needed: only books can be left. No toys, clothes or remnants of a life. It works a treat.

Around the UK, I’ve run across a load of these kiosk shops. In a quiet Warwickshire village, a call box is elegantly decorated with cut flowers. In The Scottish Highlands, a kiosk is stuffed with local guidebooks. Another is a free market stall for homegrown vegetables. A Devon call box is a nightspot (max clubbers allowed: 2). And a Perthshire kiosk was a home, imaginatively, to a village audio history archive until snapped up by a county museum.

But most are book exchanges. And with that literary note in mind, I refer to a surprise package that dropped through our mailbox this week. It’s a slim book written by 91 year old friend Bob.

He’s hit the keyboards and selflessly self-published a compilation of his ten favourite novels:

His big winners include John Steinbeck, Jane Austen, Zadie Smith, Raymond Chandler and George Eliot. ‘What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me’ Bob reflects as he quotes Virginia Woolf.

And what a vast wealth too of authors ready to come off his bench as subs: Evelyn Waugh, Arundhati Roy, Iris Murdoch, Isabel Allende… the list continues. As does, thankfully, our Bob.