1949 Chevy Bookmobile

I’ve had a soft spot for bookmobiles ever since I read 1964’s career romance for young moderns, The Girl on the Bookmobile and learned how much pleasure and knowledge these roving libraries could provide!

It was a trimly built van-like conveyance. At the rear, the doors swung open to show a miniature room equipped with shelves already stocked with books, a tiny desk, and racks clipped wherever a stray space presented itself.

(Romance and the dissemination of books ensue.)

You can imagine how thrilled we were by the 1928 Bookmobile Boing Boing showed us a few days ago and, now, by Flavorwire’s roundup of mobile books around the world! Check out the whole thing, but here are a few of our favorites. We don’t see why bookmobiles shouldn’t join food trucks as a twenty-first-century craze!

Bogor, West Java, Indonesia.

The Mobilivre Bookmobile, housed in a vintage Airstream, brings indie and mainstream titles across the United States and Canada.

Artist and activist Lemesoff Raul built the nine-hundred-book Weapon of Mass Instruction to propagate messages of peace and literacy.

Camel bookmobile, Kenya.