Inspiring Your Child to Read: Remember the Bookmobile?

Some memoir and a poem from Guest Blogger, Rex Batson

I believe you have to be of a certain age to appreciate it.  The bookmobile is all but a forgotten chapter in the history of reading, and it was a beautiful thing.  There was no library or, as it is often called now. “media center.”  I am no Luddite. Hence, this blog post. But there was great joy when  the routine of school was broken and we would stand in line, class by class, to checkout our two-book allotment. 

There was a peculiar smell to the bookmobile.  Soured paper.  Fluorescent lights gave an eerie glow. Entering the front, we passed, as we knew we should the “adult” sections.  What did those adults read that we could not?  Romance novels?  And at the end was a tiny man who would process our books.  He, himself, was an avid reader.  He focused on his book with a cellophane cover that enveloped the paper cover, and after stamping the due date, would return to his book. 

There was a similar excitement when, if I am not mistaken, the bi-annual Scholastic Book order forms arrived.  Books were from a quarter to a dollar.  They were cheap.  But they were new.  They were mine.  And my parents extravagantly gave me two or three dollars.  I remember Blaze and the Indian Cave, and Enemies of the Secret Hideout (I possess both to this day). 

These two books both had boys who were independent and had lives outside of their parents.   The boy in Blaze, lived on a ranch, and he and his horse Blaze rode out and explored a cave, cooked hot dogs, slept by the fire, and listened to Timber Wolves with a bit of fear.  Enemies.... was a book of boys who had their own tree house and club.  They, too, slept one summer night away from their parents, had their own secret code, and each nabbed food from home.  Little, self-imposed castaways—Robinson Crusoe types. 

We had books in my house.  My parents encouraged us to read.   But in some ways, the bookmobile and the Scholastic Books were a kind of autonomous act in which, consciously or not, I was forging an identity.  Does my son feel the same way when purchasing an app for his i-Phone?   Maybe, but it seems fleeting.

Bookmobile by Joyce Sutphen

I spend part of my childhood waiting
for the Sterns County Bookmobile.
When it comes to town, it makes a
U-turn in front of the grade school and
glides into its place under the elms.

It is a natural wonder of late
afternoon. I try to imagine Dante,
William Faulkner, and Emily Dickinson
traveling down a double lane highway
together, country-western on the radio.

Even when it arrives, I have to wait.
The librarian is busy, getting out
the inky pad and the lined cards.
I pace back and forth in the line,
hungry for the fresh bread of the page,

because I need something that will tell me
what I am; I want to catch a book,
clear as a one-way ticket, to Paris,
to London, to anywhere. 

Rex Batson is an Associate Professor of English at Southern Polytech University in Georgia.  He enjoys reading, writing, walking, drawing, and gardening.  He prefers to write most early drafts with a dark, soft-leaded pencil or a fountain pen.  He cannot read without writing notes in the margin.