On April 6, the library world celebrated National Library Outreach Day, previously known as National Bookmobile Day. Did you know that Fort Vancouver Regional Libraries has several bookmobile routes in Klickitat and Skamania counties? If you want to know more about our bookmobiles and where they stop, be sure to visit our Bookmobiles web page.
Growing up I was lucky enough to always have a library nearby, but I have to admit that I wish I’d had to opportunity to visit a bookmobile. I can’t think of anything quite as special as books on wheels! Transporting books to rural communities hasn’t been limited to wheeled vehicles, however; boats, airplanes, horses, even camels have worked as mobile libraries all over the world.
My tribute to traveling books is centered around kids this week, and I hope you will share this mobile-themed reading list with little readers near and far.
Hip, hip hooray for the global transport of books!
- “Biblioburro: A True Story from Colombia” written and illustrated by Jeanette Winter
- “Books by Horseback: A Librarian’s Brave Journey to Deliver Books to Children” written by Emma Carlson Berne, illustrated by Ilaria Urbinati
- “Down Cut Shin Creek: The Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky” by Kathi Appelt and Jeanne Cannella Schmitzer
- “The Library Bus” written by Bahram Rahman, illustrated by Gabrielle Grimard
- “Moose’s Book Bus” written and illustrated by Inga Moore
- “Ready to Fly: How Sylvia Townsend Became the Bookmobile Ballerina” written by Lea Lyon and Alexandria LaFaye, illustrated by Jessica Gibson
New at the Library
Fiction
- “The Dickens Boy” by Thomas Keneally
- “Long Overdue at the Lakeside Library” by Holly Danvers
- “Our American Friend” by Anna Pitoniak
Nonfiction
- “The Art of Papercraft” by Helen Hiebert
- “In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing” by Elena Ferrante
- “The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality” by Oded Galor
Children
- “Knight Owl” written and illustrated by Christopher Denise
- “Pirate Queens: Dauntless Women Who Dared to Rule the High Seas” written by Leigh Lewis, illustrated by Sara Gomez Woolley
- “Solimar: The Sword of the Monarchs” by Pam Muñoz Ryan
This is just a small sampling of the many new titles added each week to the Fort Vancouver Regional Library District collection. Find more in our catalog, or call (360) 906-5000 to reserve titles or find additional listings.
Jan Johnston, Collection Manager
Fort Vancouver Regional Libraries
You can email Jan at readingforfun@fvrl.org.
A version of this column was published in the Sunday, April 17, 2022 edition of The Columbian newspaper.
Find more book columns in our Off the Shelf blog.
