New Bookmobile to Hit the Road in March

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

“Books are a uniquely portable magic” – Stephen King

For almost 90 years, the Anderson County Library, not content with providing a beacon of learning throughout the communities it serves, has taken their mission to the streets. Beginning in March, they will have a shiny new Bookmobile to make this goal even more complete.

It all started when Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House and trucks sponsored by the Works Progress Administration rattled down rural roads so the library could send its collection out into the county, in one form or another, to people who could not easily visit the locations.  The first Anderson County bookmobile was one of those trucks, a cooperative venture between the WPA and local civic groups, making the rounds in the countryside with a cargo of borrowed words and the faint smell of gasoline.  Ten years later, in 1947, the county was already thinking about replacing it, seeking bids for a three‑quarter‑ton truck and entertaining talk of creating an independent library service devoted solely to rural areas.

By 1959, the system had grown busy enough that a larger bookmobile was purchased “to supplement the smaller Bookmobile” then in use, a phrase that suggests a rolling duet: one vehicle not quite enough, two just barely so.  Records show that in July of 1973, the bookmobile checked out a “record smashing” 8,260 books in a single month, a statistic that reads like a quiet boast from an era before metrics became a business.  Another bookmobile arrived in 1988; then, in December of 2003, the library purchased the current bus “to replace its 10‑year‑old bus,” extending the lineage of vehicles that had become, by then, as much a part of the county’s mental landscape as its courthouse or its high‑school stadium.

“It really has done the job and kind of run its course,” Annie Sutton, the Anderson County Library’s director, said recently of that 2003 bus, which is about to be retired. In its place, the library has purchased a new vehicle—smaller, nimbler, less glamorous in the way a minivan is less glamorous than a tour bus, but far better suited to the work at hand. 

“We have a bit of a smaller unit that is going to be much more accessible, easy to get on and off, easy to drive, able to go to more events,” said Sutton. “We are really excited about it.”

The word “accessible” does a lot of work here.  For librarians, accessibility is not just a matter of a gentler step or a wider door; it is the animating principle of the profession, the quiet faith that books ought to be where people are, not the other way around.  The new bookmobile, in Sutton’s telling, is less a novelty than an adjustment of the instrument—a way of tuning an old idea to the contemporary pitch of Anderson County, with its subdivision cul‑de‑sacs, daycare parking lots, and senior living complexes tucked just off the highway.

Asked to explain how the thing actually works, Sutton breaks it into two parts, the way one might describe the front and back of a small, well‑loved shop.

“The first one is it functions as a traveling library,” said Sutton.  Patrons step up into a compact interior and find shelves of books they can check out on the spot.  They can sign up for a library card there—no special exception, no provisional status, just a regular card, as if the brick‑and‑mortar building had rolled up to meet them halfway.

The route is plotted with particular groups in mind.  Seniors, who may have surrendered their driver’s licenses but not their reading habits, see the bookmobile as a visiting room of familiar authors and large‑print mysteries.  Children encounter it in the liminal spaces of childhood institutions—daycares and after‑school programs, the kinds of places where story time may be more aspirational than actual, and where there is no resident library to speak of.

“We are especially focused on going to places that are for seniors and for kids,” Sutton said, “especially those places like daycares that may not have a library. We are able to go and help them get literacy materials.”

The second part of the operation is less visible from the outside, but, in its way, more radical.  The twenty‑first‑century public library is only incidentally about bound paper; its holdings now include DVDs, compact discs, puzzles, games, and, in Anderson’s case, miscellaneous outdoor gear, the sort of catch‑all category that suggests telescopes and binoculars and things with straps.  The bookmobile, Sutton insists, is not exempt from any of this abundance.

“Anything that can be placed on hold can be brought by the bookmobile,” said Sutton.  A patron, scrolling the catalog at home or with a librarian’s help, can request a film, a CD, a Leap Station kit with puzzles and games, and have it arrive not at a branch desk but at the side of the road, on schedule, in the shadow of the new vehicle.

There is a certain comedy in imagining the word “bookmobile” painted on the side of a van that is just as likely to be carrying jigsaw puzzles as Jane Austen.  Sutton seems aware of this, and leans into the contradiction.

“We’re much more than books these days,” she said.  She is not boasting; she is taking stock.  The county’s residents, after all, are more than their addresses. Some live in neighborhoods without sidewalks, let alone a nearby branch. Others live in institutional settings where the day is regimented but the mind is under‑stimulated.  The bookmobile, old and new, threads these places together, its appearance a small event in a weekday otherwise governed by routine.

The new Bookmobile also aims to become a very visible reminder at public festivals and events of the many offerings and programs of the library in the county.

The original WPA‑era truck, long gone now, gave way to a succession of vehicles, each slightly larger or more comfortable or more mechanically sound than the last, each reflecting a moment in the county’s idea of what library service ought to look like.

Coffee in the downtown building in the seventies, a “record smashing” circulation month in 1973, the 1988 purchase, the 2003 bus—these form a kind of alternate history of Anderson, written not in ordinances or election returns but in the quiet logistics of getting books into people’s hands.

The latest bookmobile, smaller and easier to steer, is being asked to do something slightly different: to be present more often, in more places, for more kinds of people, and to carry not only stories but the tools and toys that now count as part of public learning.  In the long history of Anderson’s rolling library, this is less an extended new chapter, written in the same steady hand, with the same conviction that what the county most needs may arrive not in a grand building, but in a familiar vehicle at the edge of a parking lot.