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Most of them would probably get you fined if you just went out and did them and operating a little library turns out not to be an exception.

Streets, and a surprising amount of land adjacent to them, are city property and you can’t go building things on them willy-nilly. But people do all the time. Fences, chairs, garden doodads — all illegal. The right-of-way along Oxford Street extends practically to the wall of the Goldings’ house and officially they can’t have so much as a picnic table on it.

In the Goldings’ case, the offensive box is next to a tree in their Hintonburg yard. Like practically every street-front tree in every city in the land, it’s in the city corridor. Nobody goes around demanding those be cut down, just in case.

“This is a temporary structure. If it had to be taken down in two seconds, it could easily be lopped off,” Golding said. “If it’s too big, fine, we’ll make it smaller.”

Golding suspects someone who doesn’t live nearby is widening an ongoing dispute about parking on streets by his house.

“The city has this bylaw, it’s complaint-driven, and I don’t even get a chance to see my accuser, who may or may not be using this to get at us,” Golding said.

We put a little free library in front of our house last fall, hoping it would become a swap spot for kids’ books. Mostly it does a brisk trade in cheap paperbacks. That’s been an education: People love their John Grisham and David Baldacci and George R.R. Martin, though you literally can’t give Stieg Larssen away, the market is so flooded with secondhand copies of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” I hit the book racks at Value Village every few weeks, looking for last year’s bestsellers to drop into the mix.