put the thing somewhere people already walk. make it easy to take. make it easy to return. most apps could be a library.
pocket libraries started because of two stubborn beliefs. one: you do not need a big building, a board of trustees, or a sponsorship deal to have a library. a corner is enough. a shelf is enough. a tiny room next to a kids' play area is, it turns out, more than enough. two: kids deserve the feeling we had as kids - that very specific, slightly magic feeling of standing in front of a shelf of books and realising you can take any of them home.
we wanted small humans to have the same disproportionately large feeling we did, in front of a shelf, deciding.
it took months. and months. and months.
people see the finished thing - the shelves, the cushions, the children - and assume it came together in a weekend. it did not. it took an embarrassing amount of planning. company names that sounded great on tuesday and terrible by friday. a book stamp that went through, conservatively, eleven versions. a logo we still tweak. signage. shelving. the exact right kind of bean bag, which is apparently a category with strong opinions. which we then got rid of within a week.
we also had to figure out the boring, unglamorous bits: how do you catalogue 800 books without losing your mind. how do you let kids check things out without it feeling like airport security. how do you say ‘please return this’ in a way that is kind but also, you know, results in books being returned.
the actual library, in case you want to visit
the first branch opened in november 2023 at jaffery sports club in lavington, right next to the kids' play area - which is the entire point. children walk past, get curious, pull a book off the shelf, and parents discover their kid will, in fact, sit still for forty minutes if the book is good enough.
in january 2026 we opened a second pocket at provisions kenya, on mugomoini close in lower kabete. green, calm, full of plants and good light. a near-perfect place to read. (there was briefly another second - at 209 state house - which closed in december 2025. that's how this works. some libraries stay, some don't. the books move on.)
everything is reinvested back into books and programmes. it's a registered non-profit. we are not getting rich off children's picture books, which is probably for the best.
what we keep learning
we are still figuring it out.
every time we think we've solved something, a seven-year-old immediately finds a better way of doing it.
we move shelves around. we rewrite signs. we try new systems. we retire old ones. occasionally we discover that a thing we've spent three weeks discussing was never actually a problem in the first place.
libraries are less fragile than we thought.
people borrow books and bring them back. children recommend books to each other far more effectively than we ever could. entire friendships seem to appear because two kids reached for the same diary of a wimpy kid book at the same time.
a surprising amount of our job is simply putting books within arm's reach and then getting out of the way.
we're still not entirely sure how a shelf of paper manages to compete with youtube, netflix, roblox and approximately twelve thousand other distractions. but it does.
and every week, another child wanders in, finds a book they love, and disappears into a corner with it for forty minutes.
which still feels a little bit magic.
that's the post.
← more notes