Down in the basement of Emmanuel Church in Boston's Back Bay sits a collection of roughly 300 life-sized puppets, all available to borrow for free. Dragons, giants, animals and mythical figures crowd the shelves, waiting for the next school pageant, street parade or neighborhood party to call them into action.
The operation is called the Puppet Free Library, and according to WCVB Boston, it lends its life-sized characters to local theaters, community groups, students and even chance passersby who wander in looking for something for their next show. Sara Peattie leads the lending team, and she has handmade most of the puppets that fill the basement, the station reports.
Peattie is also the librarian behind the collection, a role WGBH describes her holding as co-founder of the nonprofit Puppeteers Cooperative. The station reports the library has supplied free puppets to schools, community centers, parades, parties and all kinds of celebrations across the years, with many of the figures built as generalized characters so groups can lend them out for whatever story they are telling.
How Borrowing Actually Works
The system runs on trust more than paperwork. Per the Star Tribune, folks sign out puppets with a name, an email address and a promise to return them. That same report traces the Boston library's origins to the 1990s, when Peattie described it as something that “sort of drifted into being” as people borrowed and lent puppets and began keeping track of who had which ones.
The puppets themselves are built to survive years of parades and performances. The station's report notes the figures are built from papier-mâché, recycled materials and donated fabric, while the puppet-making outlet binj.news adds that the heads are papier-mâché but most of the body is fabric, wire and bamboo. Making one of the bigger puppets can take about a week, largely because of how long papier-mâché needs to dry, according to binj.news.
A Library That Wants You to Perform, Not Just Watch
Peattie has said the library tries to operate like a real library, and the article notes she has framed its purpose as encouraging people to stage giant performances with their neighbors. The collection aims to help people understand they can make their own giant shows, and it actively encourages people to take puppets into the street for community performances rather than leaving them in storage.
That mission extends into teaching, too. Peattie runs workshops that teach puppet-making craft to others, work that lines up with how the Puppeteers Cooperative has described itself elsewhere. Per Puppet Showplace Theater, Peattie serves as director of the cooperative, which specializes in community workshops, giant puppets, pageants and parades.
Part of a Wider Puppet-Lending Tradition
The Puppeteers Cooperative itself dates back further than the library. It was created in 1976 as a way to connect puppeteers nationwide, according to binj.news. That network later helped spawn a sister project in New York: the cooperative opened the New York Puppet Library in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in 2003 in collaboration with Flying Bridge Arts, according to the Puppeteers Cooperative. A year later, Prospect Park allowed that library to move into the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch in exchange for a yearly series of free outdoor performances in the park, the cooperative's own site notes.
The idea has traveled beyond the Northeast, too. A Minneapolis nonprofit had planned to open what it described as Minnesota's first free puppet-lending library, according to the Star Tribune, though the report's certainty on that detail was lower than the other facts in this account. Back in Boston, the Puppet Free Library keeps regular hours, open Tuesdays from 2 to 7 p.m., with other visits available by appointment, per the Puppeteers Cooperative listing.
