Notebook: On the Road with Bookmobiles

By mule, by bicycle, by rail, by sea, a little history of the bookmobile

A New York Public Library bookmobile, circa 1910–1920

Book Post is in the midst of a little pause, but we are re-upping some of our old favorites to keep our friends occupied. Here’s one from a few years back that we often find ourselves returning to.

As we slog our way toward the end of February, it seems like a good time to envision balmier times when we can take our reading outside through the good offices of … the bookmobile!

Adventurous indies are rediscovering bookmobiles as a way to spread their riches in the community-based spirit that has been at the heart of the current indie revival. Contemporary indie bookmobiles like Parnassus on Wheels’ “Peggy” in Nashville and Charlston’s Itinerant Literate site food trucks as an inspiration, navigating their wares to street fairs, farmers’ markets, and festivals, as well as “places with long brunch lines.” (Peggy, or Pegasus, is named for the horse who draws a book cart about in Christopher Morley’s wacky 1917 novel Parnassus on Wheels.) Parnassus’s Grace Wright mentioned to The New York Times on the occasion of Peggy’s launch that a colorful bookmobile advocates for its home bookstore even when it’s on the move. The Times also offered Decatur’s Little Shop of Stories, which received a grant from the author James Patterson to convert a used school bus into a bookmobile, and Fifth Dimension Books, a mobile-only sci-fi and fantasy bookstore in Austin, Texas, by way of example. The Times tied the bookmobile phenomenon to the ongoing vitality of independent bookselling. A Seventh-Day-Adventist bookstore in Spokane has found that adopting a bookmobile has helped them find new audiences. Among publishers, Penguin Random House has its own book truck and cart, designed to look like a Penguin classic with wheels, that, among other adventures, has traced the route of Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl road novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Follow these trucks on social media to see when they’re coming near you.