Meet the Man Behind Baltimore’s Free Book Movement

Some things just don’t change. People need books, but books can be expensive and difficult to access. Way back in 1999, Russell Wattenberg recognized this issue and started thinking about how he could solve it.

The result was The Book Thing of Baltimore — a non-profit organization that added a new and exciting facet to Maryland’s cultural landscape, and which made a great number of local residents very, very happy indeed.

More than a quarter of a century later, The Book Thing is still going strong, though it has had to weather some serious storms along the way. This is its story.

The Beginning of the Book Thing

1995 was a difficult year for Russell Wattenberg and his family. Driving down from New York to visit his mother in Florida, Russell found himself feeling completely exhausted. He called a friend in Baltimore, Maryland, who offered him a place to crash. Russell accepted.

The friend also offered something else too – a job at a local bar. This was the beginning of a huge change in Russell’s life.

“I had a lot of thirsty school teachers come in,” he said. “They would all complain about not having enough books for their classes.”

Fortunately for them, Russell had a lot of books. He brought some of the books he’d collected to the bar in his van and let customers take whatever they wanted. And with that, The Book Thing Baltimore was born.

Building a Maryland Literary Phenomenon

Over the next few years, Russell set about turning The Book Thing into more of a… well… a ‘thing’. For a while, the whole thing operated by word of mouth. People heard about the books Russell was distributing from his van, and they’d head over to the bar to help out. They’d drop off a few volumes of whatever. And then school teachers, students, and whoever else would browse and borrow the volumes.

It essentially became a 24-hour operation. If Russell wasn’t available, he’d leave his van unlocked, so that people could just browse the titles they wanted to take. As the inventory grew, he had to move to a permanent location – a small warehouse that he took over in 2005.

Over the years, Russell has found many different documents and artifacts mixed in along with the donated books. Sometimes, he said, he found death certificates and birth certificates, passports and driver’s licenses, and love letters and break-up letters.

The Book Thing was mainly about books, but Russell found himself dealing with entire lives, which had become bound up in the books people were sending his way.

A Disaster in Baltimore

By 2016, the idea of the Book Thing was over twenty years old, and even its physical warehouse location had been established for over a decade. Everything was going just fine. Then, disaster struck.

It was Russell’s neighbor who raised the alarm. Early one morning, he woke Russell to tell him that The Book Thing was on fire.

The damage was horrific. Fire had ripped through the entire space, leaving its mark on everything within. This included wiping out half of The Book Thing’s total inventory, equaling around 200,000 books.

The fire, which is still unexplained, shocked the community:

“What really struck me was, after the fire, is that even while the firemen were still there … people come up to me, not saying a word, just in tears, and giving me a hug,” Wattenberg said. “The community came out in just huge numbers.”

Quickly, the project got back on its feet. Concerned members of the local community held fundraisers and donation drives, and Russell was able to build back up from scratch. The new premises opened up in October 2017 – a Baltimore literary institution was saved.

Connecting Baltimoreans with Books

These days, The Book Thing is still going strong. Its operations are a little more formalized these days – there’s no unlocked van in a bar parking lot. Instead, the premises are located on 3001 Vineyard Lane in Baltimore.

Books are available for browsing one day a month, and there is a timed entry system. Russell and his team make an event announcement between seven days and a week before opening. All the details can be found on the BookThing.org website.

Russell doesn’t take such a big part in running The Book Thing anymore. Since 2019, Bonnie Hoppa has served as the project’s acting director. When he looks back on his time with The Book Thing, Russell is modest about its success:

“There’s no way for somebody who has their uncle Joe’s collection of World War II books to walk around to everyone in Baltimore and say: ‘I have these books, they’re all free, do you want any?” he said. “All I am is a middleman.”

Russell is clear, however, on the importance of keeping books and ideas in circulation:

“If a book is sitting in a box,” he said, “it’s not doing anybody any good. It’s not a book, it’s a stack of paper.”