Jeff Lee and Ann Marie Martin’s dream of turning a dilapidated South Park cattle ranch into a literary “home on the range” reached its ambitious Kickstarter goal on April 5, with two days to spare.

And encouraged by the campaign’s momentum — which is unusual even by Kickstarter’s standards — the Tattered Cover employees aren’t finished yet.

“We’ve added in some other goals over the remaining days of the ‘stretch campaign,’ as Kickstarter calls it,” Lee said over the phone Thursday from the Tattered Cover’s warehouse. “But our overarching goal is just to reach more people and help us get to 1,000 backers.”

That seems highly likely, as the $125,000 campaign — which as of this writing has netted $130,409 in pledged funds — already counts 919 backers. In the remaining 36 hours, Lee, Martin and their team hope to raise enough money to refinish a wagon, build an outdoor oven and add environmentally friendly compostable toilets for their long-planned Rocky Mountain Land Library.

“Eventually, we’re going to be getting sizable grants from foundations, which will always be good, but the magic of the Kickstarter campaign has been the much larger network and community we’ve developed,” Lee said.

The crowdfunding campaign for the Rocky Mountain Land Library, a 35,000-volume repository to be based at Buffalo Peaks Ranch, about 10 miles outside of Fairplay, has attracted national attention following stories in The New York Times and other outlets.

However, unlike some crowdfunding sites, Kickstarter is relatively risky because it’s an all-or-nothing proposition, with projects getting none of their pledged funds if they don’t meet the total goal in a prescribed period of time (in this case, six weeks).

Lee and Martin have invested more than $250,000 of their own money and many years into their Western-focused book collection. The facilities to house it — which will include dorms, studios and a place to eat — will cost an estimated $5 million before it’s over, according to Lee.

That makes the $125,000 Kickstarter win a modest one, but still an important step toward renovating the site’s Cook’s House building into “a microcosm of what the larger complex will eventually be,” Lee said.

At this point, the buildings have been empty for more than 20 years and don’t even have running water or electricity.

“It’s the first manageable piece. When it’s done, hopefully by the end of the summer, it will give us two lodgings where people can stay, a great kitchen, an open space that’ll become the dining room, and workshop and class spaces,” Lee said. “And of course a big empty room that will be the ranch’s first library. It will be great to actually get some books up there.”

Grants and partnerships, with organizations such as HistoriCorps, have provided both workers on the ground at the ranch and funding, and the idea for the Land Library has inspired a corps of dedicated volunteers who have given their time and expertise, as The Denver Post’s Jenn Fields reported last month. Cook’s House, for example, has already been re-roofed and repainted in anticipation of its larger renovation.

“It’s captured people’s imaginations,” said Margot Atwell, director of publishing at Kickstarter. “That’s how I got involved back in 2015.”

Atwell typically oversees dozens of projects at any one time, with a focus on outreach and education for literary spaces and independent publishers. But it’s very unusual for her to send an email to a stranger after reading an article about a project, as she did with Lee.

“The all-or-nothing model of Kickstarter is scary to someone looking to raise a lot of money,” Atwell said over the phone from New York City. “After having been in touch on and off for a year with Jeff, I realized he was still hesitant, so I took a trip to Denver (in June 2016) to see how I could personally help him through my role as director of publishing.”

After talking at the Tattered Cover’s East Colfax Avenue location, and grabbing lunch with project architect Ted Schultz at City O’ City, Lee was sold.

“I ended up missing my flight home to have that lunch,” Atwell said. “But it was worth spending a night in the Denver airport to get him on board.”

Kickstarter counts more than 12 million “backers,” a third of whom are “repeat backers” who raise about 60 percent of the funding on the site, Atwell said. Most successful projects raise less than $10,000, and in the eight years Kickstarter has been around, only 69 of its 10,899 successfully funded publishing projects (or about one half of one percent) have exceeded $100,000 — inducting the fledgling Rocky Mountain Land Library into a rare club.

Kickstarter, which does business as a public benefit corporation, collects 5 percent of the total funds collected in its campaigns.

“A lot of us here at Kickstarter are backers of this project as well, so when we got the notification during our all-hands meeting yesterday, we were nudging each other saying, ‘They made it!’ ” Atwell said. “We’re all rooting for them.”

So, too, is a growing segment of the Colorado book-loving community. The $505 donation that put the project over its goal came from Lee and Martin’s employer, the Tattered Cover.

“It was a very exciting day for us yesterday,” Lee said. “It’s going to take us quite while just to get back to all the people across the world that are really excited about this project. People are fired up about this effort because it’s real grass-roots and all-volunteer.”

To celebrate the successful Kickstarter campaign, Lee and Martin will hold a public event at BookBar, 4280 Tennyson St., from 5 p.m. to roughly 6:30 p.m. on Friday, April 7, in which co-owner Nicole Sullivan will also donate 20 percent of the night’s sales to the Rocky Mountain Land Library cause.

“It’s been stunning over the years, all the people that have come to this project,” Lee said. “It’s so much more than Ann and I ever dreamed it could be.”