"I don't care if it ever snows again."

It was a rainy gray day in December, and we were in an antique store in Ohio. We brushed the rain from our coats as we entered, greeted by an effusive elderly clerk.

“Nasty weather,” she said. “But at least it’s not snowing. Me, I don’t care if it ever snows again.”

I smiled as warmly as I could, but I didn’t respond. She was friendly, in a rather needy way, complaining at length about recent medical problems while we prowled about the store. I didn’t want to be disagreeable, but her opening comment bothered me. That was because the weather bothered me. Mid-winter, and there had been little snow in the midwest. The Japanese quince in front of our house was confusedly putting out tiny leaves. Meanwhile the television weather reports told us “another nice day ahead, so enjoy the warm weather!”

We had come into the shop looking for books from the Little Leather Library. Neither of us had ever heard of the series before that week, when Michael’s sister gave us a tiny edition of the first mythologically-based play by William Butler Yeats, “Land of Heart’s Desire.” We were both charmed by the tiny book, about 3 inches square. We sat cozily beside the fire reading the play aloud to each other, delighting in the fantasy of an Irish Beltane night where fairies hear the wild and reckless heart of a young bride and come to steal her away to their own land:

The wind blows out of the gates of the day,
The wind blows over the lonely of heart,
And the lonely of heart is withered away;
While the faeries dance in a place apart,
Shaking their milk-white feet in a ring,
Tossing their milk-white arms in the air;
For they hear the wind laugh and murmur and sing
Of a land where even the old are fair,
And even the wise are merry of tongue;
But I heard a reed of Coolaney say--
When the wind has laughed and murmured and sung,
The lonely of heart is withered away.

Closing the tiny book with an appreciative sigh, we set out to find out more about the Little Leather Library. We found that the Library was Albert Boni’s idea; he left to found the Modern Library, with the same general mission. His partners, Harry Scherman and Maxwell Sackheim, kept the Little Library going for a dozen years but ultimately closed it down to start the Book-of-the-Month Club. Between 1914 and 1923, perhaps 40 million Little Leather Library books were manufactured. First they were sold at Woolworths’ “five-and-dime” stores, then through mail order in sets; sometimes they found their way into cereal boxes as premiums. In a standard format, at a very inexpensive price ($3 for 30), readers could get not only Yeats but George Bernard Shaw, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and of course Dante and Shakespeare. For literally pennies, great literature was made available to ordinary readers.

Today, you can still find tiny books on the wall racks as you approach the counters at chain bookstores, offering whatever the gods of commerce deem appealing: diet tips, astrology hints, humor. A far cry from Dante and Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw and Alfred Lord Tennyson, all of whom the Little Leather Library offered its readers.

The project had some flaws that are obvious from the 21st century viewpoint. The literature was entirely by DWEMs (Dead White European Men). A couple of the authors were still breathing, but dead was more typical, because the publishers could avoid paying royalties by using what was in the public domain. The white, European, and male parts were important, too, because at the time the literature of that ethnic and gender grouping was considered to be universally true and appealing.

That (albeit large) problem notwithstanding, the Little Leather Library inspired us. Why should publishers assume that readers or listeners will not find inspiring literature appealing? Why not package such work as cheaply as possible, so that anyone can have access?

Today, the internet offers the possibility of sharing literature widely at little cost; at Black Earth Institute, we are working on projects to do just that. But we must take seriously the challenges that we face today; simply promoting “good work” is not enough. The literature (and, eventually, other arts) needs to be of the sort that the German poet Ranier Maria Rilke wrote about when he described the magnificent “archaic bust of Apollo” that brings to us, as a message from its beauty, “you must change your life.”

The clerk who found the small collection of Little Leather Library books is a typical American. She would be surprised, I suspect, to learn that polar bears are dying of starvation as they try to swim between increasingly distant ice floes; she would probably be surprised to learn that her (and our) consumption habits are to blame. Poets and other artists can help her make the connection. But where and how is she to hear their words? Through a podcast? In a musical setting? In some new version of the Little Library? We’re looking for answers to that question.