This month, September 2026, marks the FIVE-YEAR (!!!) Anniversary of the Tucson Tome Gnome. Launched as a pandemic community-building (but social-distancing-appropriate) idea, we are so happy to still be here, still sharing books with all of you. Over the past years, we’ve shared over 3,000 free books throughout Tucson (and surrounding areas), participated in countless bookish community events, launched Adult Summer Reading in partnership with the Tucson Spotlight, started a Solutions-Focused Community Book Club, and so much more.

Want to see a rundown of all the books we’ve hidden as part of our monthly bookish scavenger hunts? You can check out our Tome Archive Page, or see the flier below:

As a subscriber to our blog, you’re getting a sneak peek of how we plan to celebrate next weekend with our five-year anniversary book hiding! We’ll be sharing more on social media (Instagram and Facebook) later this week, but we wanted you all to hear it here first 🙂

Next weekend, on Sunday, September 27, we’ll be hiding 100 (ONE HUNDRED!) books. For real? For real! These will be 50 (2-book) bundles, including 50 copies of TJ Klune’s We Burned So Bright and 50 copies of Steven Rowley’s Take Me With You. If you’ve been following us for a while, then you know that we launched the Tome Gnome project by hiding TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea, and through insane chance and circumstance (which you can read more about here), TJ joined us as a founding board member when we became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

As such, it has become tradition to hide/share TJ’s latest book every September on our Anniversary. This year, we asked TJ to recommend a second book to pair with his, and he enthusiastically suggested Steven Rowley’s latest novel. These books are a PERFECT pairing, and we can so excited to share both of them with our community next weekend ❤

And finally (I’ve probably buried the lede here…), we are also launching our 2027 fundraiser this month! As you all know, books continue to increase in price, and as a nonprofit with no paid staff (just really committed founders and a handful of volunteer guest gnomes), every dollar donated to the Tome Gnome goes straight into our mission of running our monthly bookish scavenger hunts – buying books, buying supplies (stickers and bookmarks!), and paying for very exciting things like our liability insurance.

If you are willing to help us get a jump start on our annual fundraising campaign (which we’ll be officially launching on Sunday, September 27), early donations will make a huge difference!!! You can donate through GiveButter here:

https://givebutter.com/hiding-books-in-2027-jlgpqm

A note on GiveButter: They are an amazing fundraising platform for small nonprofits like ours – they are free for us to use and offer a lot of amazing functionality at no cost (they are SO MUCH better than PayPal and GoFundMe, which we’ve struggled with behind the scenes for the past few years…)! However, to keep it free for us, they require that we turn on the “Tip Givebutter” functionality for donations. If you’d like to donate to us BUT don’t want to tip GiveButter, you can do that!

• Removing the Tip: You can easily remove or reduce the tip amount to $0.00 by selecting “Other” in the Tip section and setting the tip amount to $0.00.
• Removing the Credit Card Processing Fees: Select “Change” next to “processing fee” (directly below your gift amount), and opt not to cover the processing fee (and we will cover it for you!).

Sadly, like all fundraising platforms, fees are always present… but we want you all to know you can remove them from your transactions if you want to!

We are so, so grateful for your continued support over these past 5 years! We hope to keep going for another five years, and your donations make all the difference. Love and hugs (and much book joy!) to all of you!

-Emily & Jody-