welcome to casual poet library!
“Community is a verb, not a noun.”
—Cormac Russell
Hello! We are a shared community library in the heartlands of Singapore—Alexandra Village, to be specific, a cosy little neighbourhood where we are surrounded by a bird shop, an antique shop, a spectacle shop, barbers, bakeries, coffee shops, 50-year-old furniture and electrical appliance stores, a laundromat, delicious hawker food, a famous tze char restaurant and so on.
Our shared library is entirely community-funded. Every shelf in our library is rented and curated by a different individual (there are 180 of us in total!). We tend to our own shelves, share our favourite books and take turns to keep the library open.
We see the huge potential our world has for healing, growth and connection. But to create a new world we need new ways of being, so we’re trying out a few things at our shared library—harnessing a community’s gifts and strengths instead of focusing on its problems, creating rather than consuming, sharing rather than hoarding.
We’re excited to see where this will lead us as we strive to build a shared library together that is run in the spirit of ease, openness, trust and respect.
how the shared library works
Rent a bookshelf
Bookshelf-owners pay to rent a bookshelf for SGD$45/month with a one-time admin fee of $25. This is for a one-year lease, which comes up to a lump sum of $565.
There are also options for a six-month lease ($49/month) or a two-year lease ($43/month).
You won’t have to pay the admin fee again when you next renew your lease.
The lease is for a minimum of six months. We don’t offer monthly payments so that we can keep the administrative side of things as clean and simple as possible and keep costs down.
We have run out of shelves at the moment, but you can still sign up for our waiting list and we’ll notify you the moment a shelf frees up.
Join the bookshelf-owner waiting list.
Read our bookshelf-owner FAQs.
Read and borrow books
The library is open to everyone!
It’s free to come into the library to browse and read books.
To borrow books, you will need to pay an annual fee of SGD$25 to become a library member. Your membership fee also helps to keep the library open and accessible.
All library members can borrow up to five books per visit. There are no late fees but you are encouraged to return the books within a month so that others can continue to share and enjoy the books.
To sign up, make a visit to our library! One of our volunteer librarians will help you with your library membership registration =)
Participate in our community
The shared library will be a space for coffee pop-ups, book clubs, painting classes, journaling workshops, community sharing sessions etc. It’s a space fertile for whatever can be shared, built and dreamed up by our community.
