UVM’s Book Nook Enters a New Chapter

Jacques-Paul Marton joined the staff of the University of Vermont in 2007 as a custodian — a word the dictionary defines as “one that guards and protects or maintains.” Marton, 66, has lived up to that definition on many levels: As the founder and steward of UVM’s Book Nook since 2010, he cares for, protects and maintains a Little Free Library that has made a big mark on campus.

Marton’s recent retirement marks a new chapter for the Book Nook, the transformation from one man’s passion project into a community-run endeavor.

Located in a comfy corner of Brennan’s Pub on the first floor of the Dudley H. Davis Center, the Book Nook is not your average Little Free Library. While that term typically designates small, adorable book cabinets stationed along neighborhood sidewalks, the Book Nook is an inviting space of its own, furnished with a thick-cushioned chair, a roomy couch, soft lighting, and décor featuring Marton’s own motivational quotes and poetry.

The books, some 1,500 of them, fill seven maple bookcases, each with six shelves, that Marton helped make himself. Shelburne Farms donated the wood, which bears the marks of old sugaring tap holes.

Open the same hours as Brennan’s Pub, the Book Nook is a space for all, including the public, to explore. People are free to leave a book or take one at no cost.

“The Book Nook is a corner of warmth among all the aluminum and hardback chairs” of Brennan’s Pub, said Anthony Magistrale, a UVM professor and former chair of the English department. For Veronica Beauregard, who manages the nearby Cat Pause convenience store and eats lunch in the Nook every day, it’s a space “to carve out a little piece of calm,” she said.

Being the Book Nook caretaker has involved many tasks for Marton, such as forging connections with local libraries and tag sales to get first dibs on hand-selecting titles. He made a habit of arriving at UVM an hour before his shift to stock new books, tidy up the shelves or create art. Even the construction of the maple bookcases took seven months of cutting, sanding and hammering, with woodworking help from friends at the Wake Robin retirement community in Shelburne.

Now UVM students will take over Marton’s work. By fall, the Book Nook will be formally embedded in the Davis Center Art Program as a space managed and curated by student staff, according to Maddie White, assistant director of marketing for the Department of Student Life and the Davis Center.

Marton is delighted to know that students will continue his work of filling the shelves with knowledge and humanity. “The books I choose are ones that tie the reader to the author’s soul, and to the reader’s soul,” he said.

The Book Nook’s story began in 2010, when UVM’s Student Life stationed a couple of bookcases in Brennan’s Pub. They sat empty for a couple of weeks before Marton decided to bring in books from home and put up a “Free” sign. The books didn’t take long to disappear.

Things grew from there. Katherine Strotmeyer, then Student Life and Davis Center assistant director of marketing, recalled Marton walking into her office and saying, “I have a good idea.” The goal of Student Life “was to facilitate and support a good idea,” she said.

And so the Book Nook was born, growing from those two sad bookcases to Marton’s lovingly curated collection of words.

Growing up in a farming community in New Jersey, Marton admitted, he had “no interest” in books besides a select few, such as Old Yeller and My Side of the Mountain. But his life turned a page during his junior year at William Paterson College (now University), when a well-read sociology professor inspired him to read more.

“I was entranced by his breadth of knowledge. I started reading everything I could find,” Marton recalled, from the antiquities to modern literature. Some of his favorites: Homer, Ovid, Dante, the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, Richard Wright, James Baldwin.

For Marton, books are healing. “Knowledge can get you through so many troubles,” he said.

He was referring, in part, to his personal struggles with clinical depression, which began during his second semester of graduate school. He was studying social research at the New School in New York City when “things started falling apart,” he recalled. Depression is still “something I live with every day,” he added.

The need to focus on his treatment prevented Marton from finishing his graduate degree. Later he ran a housecleaning and catering business with his wife, Wendy, in New Jersey. But these stressful occupations weren’t good for his mental health, he said, so Marton and Wendy moved to Vermont in 1999 with the hope of leaving stressors behind.

Books saved him, Marton said, in the wake of an attempted suicide in his forties. “They were all healing,” he said.

“It only takes one book to become a special part of a person’s life,” Marton continued. Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, in particular, resonated with him. “It made me laugh and cry like no other novel,” he said. “I did see myself reflected in Don Quixote’s misadventures. I did charge at windmills in my life. Fortunately,” he added, Wendy and his therapist “saved my life many times. I am lucky to be alive.”

Marton was drawn to the “positive and supportive” community at UVM, he said. Overseeing the Book Nook as it grew over the years, and interacting with the students who browsed its shelves, made him feel like he was back in school.

“The Nook has done so much for me,” he said.

UVM senior and Davis Center building manager Krista Fillion started visiting the Book Nook as a first-year student. She spends an hour each week there doing homework or reading, as well as watching how people react when they encounter the Nook for the first time. A typical reaction, she said, is an exclamation like “Yes, it’s really free!”

“The Nook reminds you to keep on the quest for knowledge,” Fillion said, calling it a space of “learning for leisure.”

Marton’s challenge over the years has been choosing the right books. It’s not enough to fill the shelves; he must keep “everything fresh and compelling,” he said. He “zones in” when selecting free books from sources such as the Pierson Library and Wake Robin in Shelburne, the South Burlington Public Library, and Burlington’s Friends of the Library.

The titles Marton chooses are ones that he feels speak universally to readers. He aims to help “students become who they want to be through the humanities,” he said. “Art informs. This is what’s going to carry humanity.

“Books can be mentors,” Marton added. “They can break you out of a sort of prison if you were brought up in a narrow environment.”

Marton has come a long way since Old Yeller. The Book Nook’s shelves hold diverse and eye-opening reads: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, On Being Gay: Thoughts on Family, Faith and Love by Brian McNaught. The books are organized by category and subject: fiction, memoir, environment and sustainability, religion and spirituality, classics, racial and ethnic identities, poetry, gender studies, writing and publishing, world literature, philosophy.

Thousands of books have found their way into the hands of eager readers in the 13 years since the Book Nook’s beginning. Strotmeyer, now communications and community outreach director at UVM’s Cancer Center, gives Marton all the credit — but he won’t take it.

“Many hands went into building the Book Nook,” Marton said. “The project could not have happened — and could not continue to happen — without the support of the entire UVM community. That includes emeriti and the many friends and families of the university and local libraries.”

When asked if he’ll be an ongoing presence at the Book Nook, Marton beamed. “It’s given me so much,” he said. “I can’t see myself leaving UVM.” Though he’s retired, he plans to return to the Book Nook once a week for as long as he’s able — “even if Wendy has to push me in a wheelchair,” he said.

He plans to start a monthly student poetry reading and has allocated new space for artwork with social justice themes. And he looks forward to attending future community book sales to freshen up the Book Nook’s shelves.

“I’m never far from the Nook,” Marton said.

This article appears in May 3-9, 2023.

Got something to say?

Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!