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Truro library pumpkin makes a splash on Internet

Something about this pumpkin has captured people’s imaginations.Truro Public Library

A decorated pumpkin sitting on the shelf of the Truro Public Library has gained global fame this week among Facebook’s librarians and book lovers, the library director said.

The pumpkin, carved by local children and decorated by library staff, features several Lego people sitting in the comfort of their own mini-library under a tangled string of lights. For Halloween, the Lego people will even be adorned in costumes.

“I do think we do have that sense of creativity and welcomingness that kind of shows in that little library,” Tricia Ford, the library’s director, said of the pumpkin’s inexplicable attraction for people.

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“It’s something about the lights and the coziness,” she said.

Though the library first posted the photos of the pumpkin Oct. 10, Ford says the Facebook likes and shares didn’t start adding up until this week, when she started hearing from book lovers from Australia, Canada, England, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, and across the United States.

One of the library’s posts as of Friday evening had gotten 10,098 shares and 3,693 likes.

Ford said she was the one who first conceived the idea of the library inside a pumpkin. But after the children carved it and she put her Lego people inside, the end result didn’t live up to her imagination.

It wasn’t until a few of her colleagues chipped in with a decorative floor, lighting, and a lot of shellac, that the pumpkin reached its potential, she said.

“It’s something more than the sum of its parts, which happens a lot here,” she said. “It took the combined efforts of my clever colleagues to make it what it is.”


Felicia Gans can be reached at felicia.gans@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @FeliciaGans.