Like many other people these days, I do doorstep deliveries.

Sherlock Holmes to the boy at no.16 who told me he likes mysteries.Love, Nina to the northern friend in exile who finds herself cooking endless meals for a large and eccentric cast of characters (in this case her own children). A picture encyclopaedia to another friends son who sensationally complains of actually missing school. And a brand-new copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn from my own gift stash for Evelyn, my oldest customer, who is finding the days very long.

This last drop was a three-way operation involving a 24-hour buffer zone, anti-bacterial wipes, and another neighbour as go-between as both Evelyn and I were self-isolating at the time.

Evelyn sent the go-between neighbour back to me with a large cabbage as a thank you.The most surreal thing thats happened to me all week, reported go-between neighbour by text.

This is community book box meets Camus The Plague (currently being reprinted in Japan to meet a surge in demand).

No one has handed Camus in here yet, but a Joe Wicks shaht aht to the person who optimistically donated Kunderas Immortality. Instantly got borrowed.

I opened a Little Free Library outside my house on my birthday back in January. Bright yellow, planted underneath with matching miniature daffodils, two shelves for grown ups, a big upright section for the childrens picture books, Perspex door for easy browsing, and the Little Free Library slogan Take a Book Share a Book on the front.

According to the Little Free Library official world map,its the only one in Cambridge.

And it was a gloomy time in this safe Labour ward, populated with heartbroken Remainers, academics, internationals, young families and students (some households ticking all these boxes simultaneously). Yup, Guardian Central, remarked a police inspector friend, not unkindly.

So, early January 2020. How could it get worse?

(Right.)

But, back then, with my weatherproofed box on a stick,I was fighting back. Back against Brexit, and library cuts, and general grump and people not looking up from their phones as they trudged past my door to Tesco's. Fighting back against the children in my road, and roads everywhere, being told not to touch, and not to wonder, and that nothing good ever came for free.

Free books! In January! With daffodils! What's not to love?

Well, not everyone loved it.

One waspy woman buzzed down her car window to ask if I'd got planning permission for "that horrible contraption". Someone stole the comments book. Someone asked if it was a speed camera. Other people (the same person?) left a chemistry text book and a recipe book of 1970s buffet food.In German.

Under cover of darkness another reader, either catastrophically misreading the demographic or trying wickedly to provoke it, left a paperback Seventy-Two Virgins by one Boris Johnson. (Effortlessly brilliant page-turner gasps the Daily Telegraph).

I curated this straight back out and shared a photo of it with my two best friends in the road. Burn it! came the response seconds later.

But the joy of the thing has not left me.Indeed, if anything it has grown.

In three months I have got to know more of my neighbours than I have in the past three years. Ive had glorious, hug yourself with delight, pavement chats with the archivist at Newnham College who now makes special detours past the library with her grand-daughter; as well as with the man carrying a load of gardening equipment who screeched to a halt in front of my house and gasped I dont BELIEVE it!

Are you pleased? I asked nervously, still stung from Wasp Woman.

Pleased?! he roared, Im DELIGHTED!

There was the kinetic bundle of secondary school kids who abandoned their bikes on the pavement to ask is this, like, actually free? Before the virus shut the schools, 4.30pm had become their time to visit.Lurking unobserved in my kitchen, I huffed with pleasure to see how carefully they were selecting picture books for younger siblings. Now, not in uniform, they come all the time. If anyone has a stock of Wimpy Kids, Wilson and Walliams, call me now.

A good librarian knows her customers, and Im getting there. On occasion Im actually too good, offering back Alain De Bottons The Architecture of Happiness to my design-minded neighbour Jessica who had, in fact, donated it hours before. Youd love this! I said.

I know. I do, came the response. But Im only keeping the hardback.

Annoyingly, I have yet to find the right coffee table for Shack Chic: Art and Innovation in South African Shack-Lands.

Geekily, I refreshed the entire stock on World Book Day but didnt have time to make the planned fanfare with balloons and poster, so Im not sure anyone noticed.

Gloriously, one pre-virus teatime when my sons friend embarks on an elaborate narrative about her grandparents in Spain having millions of tortoises at home, I am able to shriek Wait there! before dashing outside to retrieve Esio Trot.

And its Christmas every day now when I return with my boys from a government-sanctioned walk to find cardboard fruit boxes full of teen favourites, or three supermarket bags seeping with crime novels. Who left those?! A mystery

Enforced community spring cleaning equals a doorstep bonanza. With conventional bookshops and libraries closed, and Amazon judging reading requirements as non-essential in these testing times, the Little Free Library is the only show in town. And its keeping us all going in ways I never expected when I began.

Closing my curtains at night, I see people browsing by the light of their phones (note to self: install solar panel?).When I get given a collection of phonics texts for early readers, I let my neighbour Rachel know.With a restless five-year-old who is already over the whole home-schooling adventure, somehow wandering down to choose her own story from the library makes it easier to keep sounding those letters out.

In the past fortnight Ive been offered bread for books, and veg for books, and now people are leaving jigsaws and DVDs and games in the library with notes attached saying things like Hope this is fun for someone xxx.

When I myself developed coronavirus symptoms, my younger son shot up the hierarchy to chief librarian. Do not, I rasped, propped on boiling pillows, use special books from Mummys shelf or your own shelves to re-stock the library, ok? Just look in the red refills box downstairs .

Exeunt helpful five-year-old.To a location quite possibly Not Downstairs.Lucky neighbours.

COVID-19 has changed us all. But in this small corner of a quarantined city, so has the Little Free Library. And its quite the page-turner.

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(Book) love in a time of corona - The Bookseller