For Families, a Treasure Trove of Wholesome Books

Sara Masarik founded a beloved private lending library, now offering more than 12,000 books.

Children of all ages enjoy the books at Plumfield Library. Courtesy of Sara Masarik

Sometimes life taps us on the shoulder and says, “Here’s an idea for you.”

Some of us are oblivious to that voice. Some hear the voice but choose to ignore it. Some listen, but then shake their heads and say, “No, thank you.” And some people listen, and then listen again, and then jump feet first into an adventure that will forever change their lives and the lives of those around them.

Sara Masarik jumped.

Masarik took that leap in the fall of 2022. She told The Epoch Times: “A young mom friend of mine came to me and said, ‘Sara, I’m begging you. Please help me buy the right books for my daughter. She’s an innocent soul and a voracious reader, and I can’t keep taking her to the public library because I can’t always review what she’s reading.’”

As a writer and podcaster of literary reviews, particularly of classics and children’s books, Masarik took her homeschooling friend and mother of five under her wing, offering her counsel and the loan of books from her large personal library. “I felt like the Lord was suggesting strongly that this was something I was supposed to do. So I invited that family in, and then my kids and I started to organize our books and put them into a catalog online. That family became our guinea pig.”

And right there was the moment—the tap on the shoulder and the whisper of a voice.

If You Build It, They Will Come

From January 2023 until April of that year, Masarik and her family turned the large basement of their Denmark, Wisconsin, home into Plumfield Living Books Library.

“At that point, we had 3,500 books we love in the middle of the woods. Who ... is going to want to come out here?” Masarik said. “And then we thought, well, here goes, God. If you send us seven families, I think we’ll know that this is what you intend for us to do. And by May, we had 15 families and no sign whatsoever of slowing down.

“Grace just poured into us, and these families became special to us. It became an important part of our lives, and we began to see that Friday and Saturday every week was going to be all about the library, and we’ve just shifted our focus and our energy as a family into building the library.”

In the two years since the library first moved from dream to reality, Plumfield has taken off. The basement, which houses the books, is well-lit and attractively decorated, with nooks and crannies, tables and chairs, and even a piano. The collection has already grown from the original 3,500 books to more than 12,000, most of them children’s books given by donors. Sixty families have joined Plumfield, with more than 220 children among them. The annual cost is $100 per family, and at any given time, more than 1,000 books are in circulation.

A piano enlivens the library's atmosphere. Sara Masarik

Sara Masarik. Courtesy of Sara Masarik

Plumfield Library's collection numbers over 12,000. Sara Masarik

Living Books

Like so many good things, the hard work that Masarik and her family have put into Plumfield is driven by joy.

“When you see a child loving a book, that book is living its best life, and that child’s soul is being formed by that book,” Masarik said. “Suddenly you feel a great need to make that book as available as possible. This book is living its best life in the minds and hearts of these children and their families. That’s my motivation.”

That joy that she takes in books and reading has played a role in Sara’s life since her earliest years. At Michigan’s Hillsdale College and the University of Oxford, she pursued that childhood passion in her studies of philosophy, religion, and literature. Her husband, Greg, and their three homeschooled children share her love for reading and for living books, a term devised by renowned educator Charlotte Mason for “inspiring tales, well told ... the fit and beautiful expression of inspiring ideas and pictures of life.” These are the best of books.

Consequently, over the years, the family’s library kept expanding, with hundreds of books by favorite authors like Flannery O’Connor, J.R.R. Tolkien, Edith Stein, and G.K. Chesterton, and of course an ever-growing collection of children’s books, new and old.

In 2016, Masarik found a more public outlet for her literary enthusiasms when she teamed up with her friend and fellow lover of literature Diane Pendergraft and opened Plumfield and Paideia, the website where the two women wrote reviews of living books. At the urging of friends who enjoyed these reviews, they eventually began producing and posting podcasts about literature and homeschooling as well. Recently, they’ve redesigned the site and have renamed it Plumfield Moms.

Put all of these parts together, as Masarik did, and you have the Plumfield Library.

Learning As She Goes

“Right out of the gate,” Masarik said, “we harnessed a program that a friend built called Picture Book Preschool, units of seven to 10 picture books per week, 18 weeks a year. One on rain, or there might be one on fathers or on American folk tales. The family would bring home a Picture Book Preschool, and they would pull their little ones around and read those books with them and feel good that they had done something meaningful.”

These portable collections proved popular, and Masarik and her family and other helpers have added to them. “We built ‘Wonder Boxes,’ which are science boxes for grades kindergarten through fourth grade. So they would take it out for a term or a whole semester, whatever time length they needed. It might be a creepy crawlies unit or the life of the bee unit. And it would have an old spine in it, probably a 1960s textbook, an old Childcraft book, and then lots of picture books and readers and small interesting books that would support that.”

In addition, Plumfield sponsors three ongoing classes in machine sewing, nature studies, and composition, which is a class based on a program called the Green Writer.

The library is well-lit and attractively decorated, with nooks and crannies, and tables and chairs where children can do activities. Sara Masarik

Besides the help of her three teenagers—"they’re just as passionate about this as I am”—Sara has recently created an internship class made up of “seven students, 11 and older, who are being trained in various aspects of how to run a library, so we will have more helpers.”

Among parents, Masarik has found a particular hunger for the old books. “We have the fastest turnover from the books of the 1950s. Really, I think that is the sweet spot, the late ’40s to the early ’50s. Our library has been really good for the moms and dads who’ve grown up without reading those books, but want to give that goodness to their children, coming here and finding those phenomenal picture books and excellent, forgotten middle-grade books.”

Connections

Opening and operating Plumfield Living Books has brought Masarik into contact with all sorts of other book lovers, some of them interested in founding libraries.

She and Pendergraft, along with some others, created a private lending library directory, which now lists more than 100 such libraries in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. Masarik was also instrumental in putting together a website, The Card Catalog, to answer questions others may have about setting up a library, including details like bar codes, online software, and even what sort of tape works best on books.

She has connected as well with people who are already operating private libraries, like Leah Carter of Texas, who has taken an old, beaten-about school bus and transformed it into a mobile library. For Michelle Howard, however, Masarik reserved her highest praise. “Michelle Howard is what we call the godmother of the private lending library. She has three libraries, one in Michigan and two more in Florida, where she now lives. She’s the one who’s been such an advocate for this and so publicly outspoken about it, and has been a brilliant mentor to so many of us.”

Masarik herself has played mentor for perspective founders of private libraries. Recently, for instance, she offered inspiration, encouragement, and know-how to her good friend Lara Purciel, who in February opened St. Columba’s Place in Front Royal, Virginia. This too will be a basement library, located in the home of Connie Marshner, who has long supported the idea of having such a library in town.

But it is the last of these connections—the bringing together of a book and a child who will love it—that is the best and most beautiful of all.