I first knew it was October when we were walking down Essex Street to go to the farmer’s market and a guy dressed as something spooky from a movie I hadn’t seen switched faster than I think I know how to from completely statue-still to reaching his hand out at me. (I screamed and he felt so bad but it was perfect.)
Living in or near Salem for Halloween is bizarre. My train commute gets absurdly crowded. You can’t park in town. You can’t drive through town. Random people start parking and sometimes sleeping in their cars on our street. Crowds are everyone. In October, we actually go downtown less.
We and all our neighbors are getting dressed up, and we and all our neighbors are hyped for trick-or-treaters. We of course absolutely do all the tourist things. We go to the awesome weird Halloween museums. We go to the awesome weird Halloween shops. I think everyone in Salem loves Halloween. Someone asked my friend who works in a spooky shop what happens to Salem the rest of the year, as if we all go sleep or hide somewhere. Everything stays more or less the same. Someone in our neighborhood has a giant skeleton in their yard, about a story tall, which we think they must have bought without considering where they would store it. The skeleton stays out year-round; for holidays, it gets dressed up in relevant outfits but it’s still a skeleton. Salem is like that. We still love the spooky shops, year-round. We still go to the spooky museums, year-round. Graveyards are peaceful in all seasons. The spooky arts festivals are in the summer, too. I don’t think anyone could stand it here if they didn’t like Halloween—or pumpkins or spiders or witches or bats or black cats or spiderwebs or graveyards or Tarot readings or incense or pretty and expensive rocks.
Everyone decorates for Halloween, but the truth is, for the most part, Salem decorates itself.
The gorgeous foliage? That’s just how it is here. The graveyards and cemeteries everywhere? That’s just how it is here.
The pumpkins growing in the front yard? We didn’t plant them. The spiderwebs outside our house? We didn’t plant them either. That guy dressed up as a clown? He’s an actual clown; it’s not his fault you’re terrified of him.
Speaking of pumpkins we didn’t plant—here are the pumpkins we didn’t plant. They appeared over the summer and took over the front of the house. We had to trim them to keep them off the flowers our housemate had actually planned and planted. They grew gorgeously twined around our spooky little library. We think a pumpkin must have fallen off the porch last year and planted itself. We don’t know where they came from.
Importantly, bees sleep in the pumpkin flowers.
And later, at harvest time. See if you can guess which pumpkins aren’t real pumpkins.
It’s not just us—here’s a gourd I found growing in front of a neighbor’s house.
And here are the pumpkins we did plant.
They are all either already soup or going to be soup.
I planted radishes with them and the radishes also grew happily; here are the radishes.
And here is fall foliage in the cemetery.
Here are Halloween decorations in our neighborhood at night, on my walk home from the commuter rail.
We made our own little library! Our little library is not only an accomplishment of a yearslong fantasy, it is also a constant source of joy when people stop by and a great excuse to buy books. I did most of the planning and designing, with construction and style guidance from my parents and my partner Cory and our friend and housemate and generous feudal lady PJ, and fixing from Cory, an actual mechanical engineer, when things broke. I think PJ wanted to buy a professionally built little library, at least at first, but I wanted to do something ill-advised, amateurish, in retrospect possibly manic, and from the soul and also to use a dremel for the first time in ten years.
Our little library is painted black and the books have a sometimes spooky tint, because we live in a not-yet-painted-black house that may or may not have its own soul (and if it does have its own soul, or a visiting soul (other than our visiting souls, of course), it is absolutely a spooky one) across the street from a graveyard in Salem—which of course means that most of our neighbors and subsequently most of the visitors to our little library have died. Spooky books are often also joyful books, and hopeful books—but sometimes just spooky.
This is a blog post about how we made the library/libraries. Spoiler alert, it ends up looking like this:
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Ingredients
Here’s everything I bought to make the library:
A reasonably-sized waterproof bathroom cabinet, to serve as the larger library—we painted it black, but this one was originally white, which already looked very nice as a potential library
A narrow waterproof bathroom cabinet, to serve as the small library—this one is dark brown, since it was closest to the intended black, but it also comes in white
Black outdoor paint, to paint the cabinets our preferred color, which was black—but you can choose a different color, or you can choose to not paint your libraries at all
Barrels to plant your libraries in—I bought these fancy wooden bucket barrels (18 inch, 15 inch, and 11.5 inch diameter, one for each library and the smallest destined for flowers). I like them a lot because the real wood and its smell and its texture and the metal handles were important to me because smells and textures are important to me in general, but they are expensive; cheaper, perfectly acceptable, possibly more durable plastic bucket barrels exist, and different sizes and shapes and quantities of the wooden ones—this is the fun part; you could even get this weird wishing well planter I’ve been trying to find some excuse to buy (but I have nothing in particular I want to do with it and nowhere in particular I want to put it) and stick a library in it, which is what I would probably try to do if we decided to add a third library
And here are things we already had that we also used:
A dremel, to cut out interestingly shaped window-holes
A sturdy pocketknife, to cut the plexiglass to fit the window-holes
Variously sized small pieces of scrapwood, to attach the roofs to and to make lock-type turning mechanisms so the doors don’t blow away
A drill and drill bits and screws, to attach the roofs so they don’t blow away and to attach the lock-type turning mechanisms
Lots and lots of rocks
Dirt
Flowers
A very strong glue to fix things when they break, like JB-Weld or Gorilla glue
And some things I bought to put in the library once we built it:
First, I assembled the smaller of the two shelves. (In retrospect, I should have waited until after dremeling the doors, but it worked out fine.)
The shelf fit nicely in its intended bucket, as intended, with some books in it.
I dremeled windows into the doors of both the small shelf, which was easy because I just sliced the spaces between the horizontal gaps, and the larger shelf, which was more challenging. I tried to make the windows large enough that you could see in and see the books. I considered adding more windows to the other sides of the shelves, which you could if you wanted to, but we decided on just the doors.
(Does what I’m doing make you slightly uncomfortable? It probably should. I have no training in this except Science Olympiad in high school.)
I also reoriented the doors of the larger shelf to open in opposite directions because that is more interesting.
Here is how the larger shelf looks, dremeled and assembled:
I like how the large shelf looks as a white shelf, and white might be a good fit for a different project, but we had a whole vibe planned so it had to be painted black. I think it turned out nice and dramatic.
I measured and cut as large rectangles of plexiglass as would fit across each of the doors of the small shelf, covering the windows I had dremeled in (and which had partly already existed before my dremeling). I attached the plexiglass to the doors using mounting tape, which apparently is used for cars so it is probably good enough for this purpose as well.
I cut small straps off a skirt belt I didn’t like and curled them into door handles for the larger shelf, and attached them using mounting tape as well.
Then I cut and attached the plexiglass windows on the doors of the larger shelf—big rectangles covering both the big window holes and the little door handle holes.
Here’s how they turned out, with books inside:
To make a roof, I decided to use file folders, supported by wooden blocks that had been used to deliver furniture. Here is what that brainstorming looked like.
I painted the wooden blocks black and used mounting tape to attach them to the libraries.
I wanted the roofs to be waterproof, and black, so I ordered black plastic file folders and used them as roofs, attached also with mounting tape. Cory told me that when he was improving on this idea later he mentioned my use of plastic file folders as roofs to a coworker, who said that non-engineers sometimes come up with creative ideas to engineering challenges that a person boxed in by an engineering education might not have come up with. A very kind compliment.
They turned out quite nice, I think. Very witchy and spooky.
Here they are in their buckets, outside. We reserved the bottom part of each shelf to fill with rocks so that the libraries would be heavy and more or less sturdy. The shelf comprising the smaller library is actually upside down—the now-bottom shelf used to be the top shelf, intended to store toilet paper.
We bought flowers to plant in the buckets alongside and around the libraries:
Here is Cory planting the flowers. We planted the flowers on the sides and filled the rest of the space in the buckets with dirt. The smaller of the shelves is entirely dedicated to a flower we saw a lot of bees on, which seemed like a very good sign.
Here is how they turned out, after sunset and full of books. Very spooky and cozy:
We bought a ton of books to fit in the libraries. Here are some of the books we bought:
We dedicated the hall window overlooking the libraries to the books we plan to add to the libraries. Here they are at various moments. We ended up moving them from the windowsill to a dedicated shelf under it because there got to be too many.
PJ officially registered our libraries. Here are the fancy materials they sent us, including a little plaque:
Here are the libraries with their plaque. PJ also got a gorgeous flag and a wooden sign and little reading owls sculptures.
Here’s where dreams meet reality, and it gets a little sad—but happy and better afterward. Around Halloween we had a very bad windstorm and everything that could blow away did. The library flag blew away and we found it somewhere down the street. The roof folders blew away and we did not find them. The skeleton hand you can see in the mulch also blew away and we found it later near the graveyard (maybe it was trying to return home). The fence came down, thankfully missing the libaries.
There were two problems we kept running into: one was wind and the other was rain. The roofs kept blowing away, and mounting tape was just not doing the trick. And the doors kept blowing open, letting in rain and getting the books soaked. Twice a door was blown open hard enough that it broke off.
Cory is an actual engineer. He made nice wooden door locks to keep the doors from blowing open and drilled them into the libraries.
Cory also fixed the broken door with superglue.
Finally, Cory added additional wooden supports for the roofs, and drilled screws through the roofs into the supports. No more flying away.
I’m very grateful to Cory for supplementing my—um—creativity with thoughtful and weather-aware actual engineering. Here’s how the libraries turned out, with their improvements:
L. A. K. 