Dear Mr. Winslow,

I hope this email finds you reasonably well, and I apologize for the apparent randomness of my request, but I must ask for your help in my search for a most important item. You see, my wife has misplaced a note, an important document is probably a better way to put it, and I have been entrusted, or more accurately enlisted, to retrieve it and bring it home in haste.

You may be wondering how this concerns you, Mr. Winslow, and you’d be well within your rights. The reason for this inquiry has to do with Little Free Libraries. Take a Book, Share a Book, yes? I know you are familiar. I imagine you have an idea where I am heading.

My wife encapsulated this most crucial file into the folds of a book, to be more specific, her favorite book, The Sound and The Fury by Faulkner. If you ask me, it’s a gluttonous waste of space on the bookshelf. I can never understand what he is saying, but I was just a science teacher for thirty-five years. I have no literary training. If it was up to me, I’d have put it in DeLillo. But my wife, although a fan of DeLillo, is a devotee of Faulkner. Indeed, she is almost unconscious in her attraction to Faulkner, like a stick swept into a rolling stream, and so, she has eleven or twelve copies of The Sound and The Fury floating around our house at any given time.

Yesterday, when she couldn’t find the document, she tore the house apart, shoes flying, manila folders flopped open on the crowded countertop, cheerios stuck to her socks. She eventually reasoned that the only place it could be is still in a copy of The Sound and The Fury, and she must have dropped this fated copy off at one of the Little Free Libraries. You would think it would be a simple enough solution, go to the Little Free Library (henceforth referred to as “LFL” for the sake of time), find the book, grab the important paper, and go. But herein lies the problem, Mr. Winslow, and you might know where I am going with this. My wife contains a compulsion, or better yet a propulsion, to visit as many LFLs as she can. Now that she is retired, it comprises the better part of her non-sleeping hours. She stops into a park, or a street corner, finds the LFL, browses through, takes a book, leaves a carefully curated volume that will fit the particular emotion, or, as the kids say, the vibe of the collection, and heads on her way. She considers it her own little mission, you see, to constantly improve the assemblage at each LFL, taking the offering with the weakest connection, and replacing it with a selection that ties the group together in better harmony.

So, clearly, it will be a challenge to find the correct location, but I like my wife to think of me as a practical man of the world, so when there is a problem that needs remedying, I steady my sights on solving it. I started with the LFL at the park in Plainville, found another in a neighborhood off 106, stopped at the LFL outside the pizza place in Foxboro, and then circled back to the purple one on Madison Street in Wrentham. I’ll be honest, I am amazed at how many of these things there are out there. Unfortunately, I found but one copy of The Sound and The Fury in my travels, at Kelly’s Pizza LFL, and it contained no important documents within its worn pages. When I returned home this afternoon and told my wife of my travails, she sighed and said, “Yes, that makes sense. Kelly’s has been going through a bit of a modernist phase over the past month. I’m not surprised I left him there. I believe I took Pynchon, he was flapping his wings in everybody’s business.” A year or so ago, I would have taken her account of this LFL as gospel. Nowadays, sir, her memory is difficult to trust. We were hopeful for a while that it was just a reaction to the medicine, but it is clear now that it’s something worse.

Anyway, the reason I am writing you, my fearless friend, is because after she said all of this, her back went straight and her eyes jumped to the top of her head. “We need to find Francis Winslow. His book is in every LFL in the area. He is our best shot to find the note.” She sprinted out of the kitchen, socks slipping across the hardwood floor like a slalom skier, or more accurately, like a child in her first pair of skates on a freshly frozen pond. She returned from her study with four copies of your book, One More First Time.

As the day had waned considerably by that point, and in my advanced age I tend to feel the ever earlier pull of a late afternoon nap, I thought the most practical move I could make was to do some home research on this Francis Winslow fella. So, I read your work. I must say, Mr. Winslow, I was impressed. I found your protagonist, Phil, last name unclear, to be particularly compelling. I guess I would say that I liked the way he hated himself. His stepfather, if that’s what you’d call it, Captain, was a terrific delight as well, a cruel collage of misanthropy and libertinism. If you would indulge me, I especially liked the passage where Phil tells Captain of his friend who chefs in a hoity-toity restaurant and cannot eat contently anywhere else because he is poisoned by ambition, he can “only taste the mistakes”. I am not sure why, Mr. Winslow, but I found that paragraph refreshing. Maybe it shined a bit of light on my own vanity, but I am no literary critic, just a science teacher for thirty-five years, which I think I mentioned.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I finished your impressive story and followed up by spending over an hour on the web reviewing your site. What started as an investigation turned swiftly into a celebration. I wish you nothing but the best in your pursuit of literary fame and fortune. I know little of guerilla marketing and the work of the fine folks in the publishing industry, but I have to imagine there is a better strategy for placing your book into the hands of willing readers than dropping free copies off at every LFL in driving distance, but I guess this email exists as evidence directly in contrast to that piece of unsolicited advice.

I ask of you, Francis, if I may, only one thing. As you continue your mission throughout our great Commonwealth, inspecting each and every LFL to make sure they maintain your presence, please stop and look for copies of The Sound and The Fury. If you see one that contains a twice folded yellow paper with a scraggly list labeled “Amelia’s Last Dance: Things To Do Before This Bird Has Flew,” please call me at the number below. Time is of the essence.

Respectfully yours,

Paul