Why Shop? In Maine, the Library of Things Has It All (Almost).

Here’s a short but by no means comprehensive list of items that patrons of Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick, Maine, can check out for free: A dumpling steamer. Cannoli-making tubes. A ukulele. A heated leg massager. A Happy Birthday sign. Easels. A foam ax throwing game. A KitchenAid mixer, in chrome or red.

Mary Gerber, a retired schoolteacher, borrowed hula hoops and a cornhole game for her son’s 2022 backyard wedding, and, more recently, a spiralizer for her homegrown zucchini. Betty McNally, a retired bookkeeper, routinely borrows a loom and a drop spindle to hand-spin yarn. In late July, she checked out a root slayer to tackle the overly abundant hostas in her yard. She’d had it on hold, because there was a waiting list.

“It feels revolutionary,” Ms. McNally said. “I’m not buying it and storing it and the great thing is it’s really useful but I’m probably only going to use it once or twice. This way, other people can use it. It’s perfection.”

50 States, 50 Fixes is a series about local solutions to environmental problems. More to come this year.

The Library of Things at Curtis Memorial Library was founded in 2018 to make pricey items accessible and encourage people to buy less stuff. It now has more than 1,500 items, all tailored to meet the needs of the roughly 22,600 people who live in Brunswick, as well as nearby Harpswell, which has a population of just over 5,000.

There’s a driving kit with miniature street signs, a lesson book and a sample test to familiarize new drivers and migrants with the rules of the road. Food canners, fruit tree pickers, molds for homemade Popsicles, a food dehydrator and tomato strainers are offered to help people make their own food.

Items in high demand can be checked out for only a week, and include a grain mill for grinding fresh flour, a nut wizard to gather acorns and other nuts, and, this being Maine, a blueberry rake.

Curtis Memorial’s Library of Things was started by one of its librarians, Hazel Onsrud, a sunny dynamo who sports buttons with cheery slogans (“Libraries are for everyone,” reads one) and greets patrons with high-fives. Ms. Onsrud also helped start weekly hardware and art supply swaps and a program that allows library cardholders to check out camping equipment. Curtis Memorial also hosts repair cafes, where volunteers and staff members help patrons mend broken things, most commonly lamps.

“We’re meeting community needs in a globally responsible way,” Ms. Onsrud said.

Part of the building’s second floor is filled with items from the Library of Things, all neatly arranged with laminated labels that Ms. Onsrud, who is averse to plastic, initially resisted until practicality won out.

A section of the basement holds seasonal items such as children’s snowshoes, sharp things like french-fry cutters and items that might clang and disturb library patrons on the floors above, like musical instruments, cake pans and muffin tins.

On the main floor, behind the checkout desk, items on hold await pickup and recently included Wi-Fi hot spots, a portable CD player, a tongue drum, and a die-cutting and embossing machine.

Part of the motive behind the collection is to encourage patrons to try new experiences, like:

Online instructional videos are available for more complicated items and tools such as nail guns can only be checked out by people age 18 and up. All the borrowable things are either donated to or purchased by the library, and some items are worth hundreds of dollars. Patrons are responsible for lost and damaged items, beyond regular wear and tear, though Ms. Onsrud said such occurrences were rare.

Libraries regularly lend out games and puzzles but libraries of things go further. They generally have a broader range of offerings than their close cousins, tool libraries, though they often offer those, too. One 2023 survey found there were more than 2,000 libraries of things worldwide, all aimed at reducing consumption and waste. Most have membership fees, making Curtis Memorial’s free offerings relatively rare. Locals flock to the place: There were more than 3,700 checkouts over the past year.

Its popularity has had a local contagion effect.

In 2020, the City of South Portland started an electric tool library, free for library card holders, to encourage people to rely less on gas-powered lawn and garden tools. One regular is Yvette DiLallo, who frequently borrows an electric lawn mower. “It’s quiet and there’s no gas blowing back in my face,” she said.

In 2024, a librarian started a Library of Things at Prince Memorial Library in nearby Cumberland, Maine, after hearing Ms. Onsrud speak at a conference. Its most popular items include two e-bikes, on loan from a bicycle coalition, along with bocce and pickleball sets and outsize games. “Not everyone needs to own a giant plastic Connect Four set,” said Keelin des Rosiers, a marketing and communications librarian there.

Windham Public Library, also in southern Maine, created its own library of things in 2023. Its offerings include door knob grips for people who have trouble grasping, and weighted utensils to help people with Parkinson’s disease to feed themselves.

“They can take out the whole kit and try what they think might be useful before they go out and purchase it,” said Sally Bannen, a technical services librarian. “There’s nothing worse than if you’re on a fixed income and purchase something and it’s not really quite what you thought it was going to be.”

Not every sharing idea at Curtis Memorial has worked out. A plan to lend out e-bikes, electric cars and electric tricycles was nixed because its rollout coincided with early Covid-19 shutdowns and fears of contaminated surfaces. And an effort to get patrons to grow and propagate plants was scrapped after a lot of the plants ended up dead. “We needed more growing literacy,” Ms. Onsrud said. Still, the idea ended up being repurposed into regular plant and seedling swaps.

“If a few of us can do this in Maine,” Ms. Onsrud said, of the growing library of things movement, “Anyone can.”