Sara Peattie runs a free public puppet lending library in a Boston church basement, stocked with papier-mache giants she and collaborators built over decades.
Key Takeaways
The Puppet Free Library lives under Emmanuel Church on Newbury Street; open Tuesdays 2-7pm, free to borrow, sign-out by paper logbook.
Peattie co-founded the Puppeteers’ Cooperative in San Francisco in 1976 to connect puppeteers and produce community street pageants.
Large puppets take roughly one week to build; construction is cardboard, wire, bamboo, fabric, and papier-mache heads – simpler than they appear.
Peattie uses “dazzle camouflage” as a design principle: visual complexity hides structural simplicity so audiences see the dragon, not the cardboard box.
A paper logbook replaced a failed computerization attempt; enforcement is personal phone calls, not systems.
