Who Remembers the Bookmobile? History and the Small Press

[lludwig]

I grew-up in a village outside of town where the main library was located (est. 1956) Although I was in town several times a week and went to the library frequently, I was very excited when the bookmobile came to my village. A bus load of books!

"...one new avid reader described the bookmobile as “the best thing . . . since they paved the roads.”

[The] "relationship between the library and the bus—the book and the twentieth-century forms of mobility—is, of course, not new. In the US, the history of this form of library service goes back to the early twentieth century. It has roots in progressive education movements at the turn of the century and related broader ideological commitment to developing new infrastructures as a project of community—and through that—nation building. Early book mobility took many forms: Books were circulated from canal boats in Washington, DC, by mountain pack mules in Kentucky and Tennessee, while small reading rooms for railroad workers were set up in railroad cars. But it was the 1960s and 1970s that saw a real boom in mobile book circulation, which was a direct consequence of the burgeoning car culture at the time.

In 1904, there was one bookmobile in the US; in 1937, there were sixty; and by 1965 there were over two thousand all over the country. By the mid-1960s, one in every six libraries in the US operated a mobile service. The book buses became so popular, that car manufacturers started producing bookmobiles ready for use, and Bro-Dart industries, a library supply company, made a line of fully furnished trailers complete with books which were fully processed, catalogued and ready to roll. “Here comes the bookmobile!” became a familiar, somewhat iconic slogan in twentieth-century newspapers and magazines, memoirs, novels, and children’s books alike. The prominence of the bookmobile in American imagination was such that when the American Book Publisher Council was invited by the Department of State to send a book display to the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, it was a bookmobile that was chosen to represent the American reading culture..."

Read More:
https://www.full-stop.net/2021/03/01/features/essays/kaja-marczewska/here-comes-the-small-press/?fbc...

[picture*books]

I grew up in Kentucky and remember the bookmobile coming through my neighborhood routinely in the mid-1960's. I think I found my favorite childhood book on the bookmobile - Beverly Cleary's The Mouse and the Motorcycle! I love that book. It might not be entirely racially and species sensitive to mice therefore I hope eBay doesn't ban it from sale.

[taylor_memorial]

My home town had a central library by the time I moved there--one of the founding families had left their "mansion" to that purpose, so no bookmobile. But I remember them appearing in stories and stuff. 

Much later, in a previous incarnation, I was a construction estimator and we built a couple of libraries. One in a wealthy community (Hudson, OH for those who know the area) and the other in a not so well-to-do and much more rural area up around Lake Erie in the primary Snow Belt. 

The latter had a bookmobile bay built into it. 

We now live in an exurb, and some of the more rural areas are served by bookmobiles as well. From time to time I come across books de-accessioned from a bookmobile.