During the COVID-19 pandemic, different people had different ways to deal with the increased amount of time they had on their hands. Throw a rock and you could find someone in the arts figuring out what their new project would be. For author J. Hunter Bennett, it became a way to clean out some old books. I would be pressed to think that he knew this endeavor would lead to his latest book, More Punk than the Public Library: The Adventures of a Little Free Punk Rock Bookstore. Here, Bennett describes his accidental building of a punk‑literary micro‑community, and captures its evolution.
Setting up a little library outside his house on a busy corner in his Chevy Chase, DC neighborhood, Bennett started the Nevada Avenue Outdoor Free Bookshop (NAOFB). It was here Bennett decided to unload some of his punk rock and crime books to anyone who walked by. He accompanied this with a monthly newsletter he printed himself and left copies inside. What started as a way to cope with the horrors of the pandemic and the government’s handling of it turned into a staple of Bennett’s neighborhood. It eventually grew into an underground punk zine. This book is a reprinting of the issues, formatted and collected for your convenience. Each chapter goes over each issue or communique, as our editor proprietor gives us a little context before presenting each issue.
Sections like “Hardcore Reading With…” are interviews with various members of the Washington D.C. Hardcore scene as they talk about the books they like and make recommendations. “Fell in Love with a Book” is a column where a guest writer comes in and gives a review of a book that means a lot to them. As issues go on, more columns and sections are added. At one point, his page count gets to about twenty pages. Bennett ends up with a pretty stacked lineup of people to contribute, with interviews from members of bands like Embrace, Velocity Girl, and Dag Nasty. He also gets some cool essays about his personal life, recruiting his sister and mom each for a book review.
While More Punk Than the Public Library… does mostly follow a wash, rinse, repeat format, it’s extremely entertaining. Each chapter is uniform to the context and then a reprinting of the corresponding month’s issue, but the contents of each book will win you over. Despite starting as a personal project, the NAOFB sort of ballooned in the best way possible. What became a way to kill time during one of the darkest times in modern history is now this book. Each issue of Bennett’s zine may tell small stories and anecdotes about the contributors, but this book is a fantastic way to show how a community can come together and be built over something as small as a little library with secondhand books on a street corner.
More Punk than the Public Library: The Adventures of a Little Free Punk Rock Bookstore was published and is available through Microcosm Publishing.
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