The Millbrook Free Library’s “library of things” passed its thousandth checkout in July, three years after starting with fourteen donated hand tools on a cart near the circulation desk.
The collection now runs to 340 items: power tools, garden equipment, kitchen gear, board games, a telescope, a projector, two sewing machines, 41 musical instruments and a carpet cleaner that director Joan Petrosky describes as “the hardest-working object in this building.”
The most-borrowed item
It is not the carpet cleaner, though that is second. It is a pressure washer, checked out 63 times, mostly in April and May.
- Pressure washer — 63
- Carpet cleaner — 58
- Stud finder — 44
- Projector — 39
- Cake pan shaped like a lamb — 31, all but two of them in the two weeks before Easter
Somebody donated that lamb pan in 2023 and we genuinely put it out as a joke. It has now been borrowed thirty-one times. I have stopped predicting anything.
Joan Petrosky, library director
How it works
Any Millbrook card holder can borrow, one item at a time, for a week. There is no fee. Damage is handled the way damaged books are — a conversation, usually not a bill. Petrosky says three items have been lost outright in three years and two were returned months later with an apology note.
The instruments
The 41 instruments came from a single 2024 donation by the estate of a Millbrook music teacher, and they circulate on a longer loan — a full month, renewable twice. The library added a beginner method book to each case.
“A parent is not going to spend $300 to find out whether a nine-year-old likes the clarinet,” Petrosky said. “Now they can find out for free, and about half the time the answer is no, and that is a completely fine outcome.”