Library Officially Launches New, More Versatile Bookmobile
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
Bookmobiles are never forgotten. That theme rang out from personal accounts of how lives were made richer growing up with access to a rolling library that provided a window to a larger world.
Anderson County Administrator Rusty Burns said the bookmobile of his childhood provided reading material beyond the Bible and Progressive Farmer when he was growing up in rural Edgefield County, both of which he said he read, but that more was required to provide a bigger picture of the world. On the days the bookmobile came, Burns said, the world got larger by several hardbacks at a time. He knew exactly how many he was allowed to take home, and he would read them in two or three days.
Burns also said the new vehicle is part of the library’s commitment to be “a community center for all seasons.”
The library’s director, Annie Sutton, reminded the crowd that the new Anderson County Library Bookmobile is replacing the retiring bus that has been doing the rounds since 2004 and had “earned its retirement.” In that time, she said, libraries have gone from “quiet repositories of books” to “bustling community centers,” where you can borrow not just novels but board games, tools, and Wi‑Fi hotspots, and where “outreach” means showing up at festivals, daycare centers, senior residences, and the occasional manufacturing plant.
The new rig is smaller, which makes it easier to thread into parking lots and down rural roads, and it’s outfitted with removable carts so the staff can swap out storybooks for large print to tailor the books to the audience of each stop.
The entrance to the new vehicle is low and broad enough that children and seniors can manage it without drama. The plan is to keep doing the old‑fashioned route stops—places like Townville and Roberts Church—but also to turn up wherever people already are: at community events, business parks, and impromptu book deserts that become less desert‑like when the truck doors swing open. Outside, there will be tents, games, and the sort of “fun spaces for the kids” that have made the brick‑and‑mortar branches noisy in the best possible way.
Another bookmobile child, Annette Greenway, now the library’s assistant director, was also eager to supply institutional memory. When she was growing up, she said, the bookmobile parked a block from her un–air‑conditioned house, which was served by a single family car and an insufficient number of owned books. She remembers sitting on the cool floor, reading about Amelia Earhart, a quadriplegic artist named Joni Eareckson Tada, and the lion cub of “Born Free,” each of them expanding her sense of what might be possible in a life that, at that point, did not include central air or a steady supply of paperbacks.
Greenway confessed that she could no longer recall what she read last week but could still summon those titles from childhood, along with the memory of the woman who drove the bus, whose name is gone but whose role—book courier, horizon enlarger—remains. There was a period, she said, when people in the profession muttered that bookmobiles were “going out of style,” their aging fleets retired without replacement. The Anderson vehicle is an argument against that, and against the idea that library services are entirely digital now; it is meant for people who can’t get to a building, or would never think to, but who will walk across a parking lot to see what’s inside a colorful truck.
Meanwhile Burns said the new rolling library was more than a place to find books and other materials, it was a beacon of freedom.
Evoking the famous 1943 photo of Woody Guthrie holding his guitar bearing the slogan “This Machine Kills Fascists,” Burns pointed at the new Anderson County bookmobile and said it too kills fascists. He did not mean it literally, of course, but in the way Guthrie’s guitar killed fascists, because it “provides dreams, education, a window to the world,” which is more or less the mandate of a bookmobile, whether it is trundling down a dusty Edgefield County Road or pulling into the parking lot of a Roberts Church store.
It is a machine washed in bright graphics and the promise of Wi‑Fi, climate control, and carefully curated carts of books that roll off onto sidewalks and into parking lots. Anderson County’s new outreach bookmobile was making its debut in front of the main library, which has been sending books out on wheels since 1937.
