In the heart of Jersey Shore and deep in the Nippenose Valley, down Route 44, hanging off a telephone pole is a red wooden box in the shape of a schoolhouse. Drivers are invited to pull over to the side of the road and peek at what is inside, take an item, leave an item if they have one, and drive off with their world a little better.

This red box is about the height and width of a flatscreen television and deeper than a shoebox. It’s a library, and it belongs to Mary Ellen Embick. She will share its contents with anybody.

Books have been Mary Ellen’s life and, pardon the cliche, you can take the librarian out of the library, but you can’t take the library out of the librarian. Her miniature library—little free libraries as they’re often called—is just one of many that have been popping up in the Twin Tiers, all over the country, and all over the world.

“My life is defined by books, and I owe it all to my mother,” says Mary Ellen, who retired as a librarian for the James V. Brown Library in Williamsport.

Her favorite books were the Old Mother West Wind series by Thornton Burgess, stories which featured the adventures of talking and anthropomorphized animals. This series is available on Project Gutenberg and other online sources.

“In one, a barn caught on fire and these little mice were in matchboxes pulling their babies across the snow,” Mary Ellen recalls. “And I would cry and say to my mother, ‘Read that part again!’”

As a mother, she shared her love of books with her own children.

“I would hold the kids, and hold the books, and put their fingers on those little pages.” She says she started this when they were just months old. “I would read to them before they were put to bed. We would look at the pictures.” She remembers that it wasn’t too long before her kids were able to recite the stories themselves.

“They became voracious readers,” she says.

Her interest in miniature libraries was sparked when “we were on vacation or driving around.”

“I would point out little libraries to my husband. Sometimes we stop, sometimes we were not able to stop, but that has always been an interest of mine, and I just think it’s so neat for a neighborhood to have a little library.”

So, her husband took action.

“Unbeknownst to me, my husband spent the fall of 2023 making my little library, and that was my Christmas gift,” Mary Ellen says. “And I always have books here that I’m going to read, I have read, or I’m keeping. I also go to several library book sales, so there’s always a ton of books.

“It didn’t take any time at all to put things in,” she continues. “Then, of course, some people drop things off, some people pick things up.”

When she’s done with the books she’s read, she places them in the red box, and the book then waits for a new home. She puts out cookbooks, quilting books, romances, westerns (she says her husband reads those), and plenty of children’s books. Mary Ellen keeps the books in her library family friendly.

“Our picture window faces Route 44, and I sometimes see people stop,” she says. “Last summer, there was a gentleman who stopped with his daughter. They actually spent quite a while looking at the different books. I would say she was between six and eight years old. They had pulled out a number of books. She was looking at them, and that just made my heart happy.”

Her children’s books are “mostly paperback, some of the little cardboard page books, things that I probably would have read to my kids.”

Mary Ellen has seen members of the Amish community stop by her library and inspect the books. She suspects they would probably be interested in the quilting books, maybe the cookbooks, but “probably not the historical romances.”

But who knows, right?

Her love of books has inspired a member of her extended family to put up a little library in his yard.

“He and his wife live in Virginia, on a country road. He made a little library, and I supply him with a lot of books,” Mary Ellen says. “He really gets a lot of use on his little country road, thanks to there being a lot of walkers.

“Every morning, this older gentleman would come, and he would put his newspaper in the little library, and he would continue on his walk, and then somebody else would come and take the newspaper out of the little library.”

“My mom’s love of reading has affected our family, and it has encouraged all of us to pursue our education further,” says Laura Cross, Mary Ellen’s daughter. “We are avid readers. I have continued this onto my children. Both my mom and I read to them a lot when they were younger. They now enjoy reading for themselves.”

Mary Ellen says that books, reading, and literature are part of a greater storytelling tradition that began thousands of years ago with the earliest people, and continues to today.

“When cavemen carved letters and drawings on stones and inside caves and things like that, to me that’s the beginning of literature, books, and reading,” Mary Ellen says.

And what about the change in the way people read?

“I think holding a book in your hand has somewhat gone by the wayside, with modern technology, Kindles, laptops, and just teenagers playing on their phones and communicating with friends that way,” Mary Ellen says. “I don’t want to be a naysayer, but I do think there’s a difference [between an e-book reader and a real one].” She says the love of holding a book “will never go away for me.”

“Books introduce readers to things that are maybe not in their home life,” she continues, “and allow them to head in a [different] direction where a book can teach them” about those things, and then “open windows and open doors for them.”

Thanks to Mary Ellen, the world—or at least a portion of it—is now available in a red box on a telephone pole, along Route 44 in the heart of Nippenose Valley.