A Singapore Library Shares Its Costs Across 180 Shelves
In her TEDxSingapore talk, photographer Rebecca Toh argues that a shared library can create connection by giving people a practical way to build and care for a public space together. In Singapore, 180 people each rent a shelf for their personal collections, while volunteers staff a library that visitors can use for free. Toh says the shelves make strangers’ interests visible—and the shared work has turned the library into a place where people feel at home.
A post seeking 50 people drew about 300 responses
The idea came to Rebecca Toh during a sabbatical in Japan, where she visited a small shared community library. She could not read the Japanese books, but sensed “a very powerful energy of love and care” in the space. Back in Singapore, she posted a vision for a similar project, thinking that 50 interested people would be enough to try the “impractical, dreamy, and idealistic” idea. The Instagram post described a bookstore not focused on making money, but on staying open and being built physically and energetically by the community.
By the end of the first day, about 300 people had sent direct messages saying they were seriously interested in renting a shelf and building the library together. Toh says she was moved by the passion in their messages, and by the realization that so many people cared about books. She found a place to rent on the third day and signed the lease on the fourth. With help from many people, most of them strangers, they built the library in three months.
The library stays open by spreading rent and work across a community
Toh describes a shared library in Singapore built around a simple arrangement: 180 people rent and maintain their own shelves, while volunteers keep the space open to everyone. Each bookshelf owner pays 45 Singapore dollars a month. Toh says sharing the rent among 180 people means no one person has to carry the financial burden of keeping the space open.
The library sits among shops in Singapore’s heartlands, between a furniture store and an antique shop, surrounded by birds, trees and, as Toh notes, a few chickens. Its 180 shelves are not just storage. Each is a personal collection, arranged and decorated by its owner, and together they make the library a display of individual interests. Toh says visitors sometimes stop in front of a shelf with the sense that they understand its owner, despite never having met.
Rent is only one part of the arrangement. About 40 volunteer librarians take turns staffing the library six days a week, 12 hours a day. They include shelf owners and other community members: doctors, former lawyers, students, mothers, freelancers, retirees, and a five-year-old.
Their work keeps the space operating; visitors can come in, read for free, sit down, make a connection, or have coffee brewed by someone on site. Toh presents this as a practical way for a group to share the cost of a local space: shelf owners contribute rent, volunteers contribute time, and public access remains free.
The shelves make personal collections into invitations
The arrangement makes the owners visible through what they choose to share. Raymond’s shelf brings together his interest in Japan through books and CDs. On Tuesdays, he sets up a stall outside the library to sell secondhand copies and brews coffee on a pay-as-you-wish basis.
Wanqi and her five-year-old son, Liam, divide their shelf between his favorite children’s books and her books. Liam decorated it, and visitors are greeted by a note saying, “I am happy you came to our bookshelf!”
Other shelves carry stories that extend beyond their owners. One owner has put books from Kin San, a Hong Kong bookshop that has closed, on her shelf, along with a miniature version of its banner: “Ideas are bulletproof.” Toh says Kin San lives on in the library. Mira, a preschool teacher, has added a mailbox to her shelf so visitors can write her letters; she has promised to write back.
These are small gestures, but they change what a shelf can do. It can share a taste, preserve a memory, or invite an exchange with someone who arrived as a stranger. Toh calls each shelf a “little pocket universe”—a glimpse into another person’s interests and mind.
The library’s return is a place people help make welcoming
For Rebecca Toh, the return is not primarily financial. After about four months of operation, she said many participants had found the library to be one of the rare places where they felt truly at home.
The space also hosts book clubs and women’s sharing circles, as well as curry and hot-pot nights, including a hot-pot dinner for 40 people. Twice a month, the library stays open late—“as late as the last person would like to stay”—for reading, deep work or simply sitting quietly.
Toh sees community in the routines that make the library welcoming. People bring food, drinks, ideas and resources to share; borrowers return books promptly despite the absence of late fees; children remind one another not to bend pages and to put books back. Volunteer librarians clean and catalogue books. She reads these actions as signs that people want others to have access to the books and recognize the care invested in the space.
This little library has given me renewed hope that we do have the power to come together to build what we think is missing in our lives, in our city, in our world.
Toh says the project has made Singapore feel more generous, warm, open, kind, joyful and trusting to her. In a world she sees as increasingly lonely and fragmented, the library has given her renewed hope that people can come together to build what they feel is missing—in their lives, their city or their world.