Bookmobile news round-up

From Jordan to China to Indonesia, to the Boing Airplane Co. in Seattle and a boxcar in Montana- and now with more printables!

• "Mobile Services, The Seattle Public Library -- The Bookmobile," via HistoryLink.org (editorial comment: Aweseome pictures)
  "On May 4, 1931, Seattle's first bookmobile, with 600 books, hit the road to West Seattle. Each day of the week, the van and its driver and librarian visited different parts of the city, making stops at prearranged locations. The last stop on Mondays was the Boeing Airplane Co. The bookmobile, designed by Arthur D. Jones of Seattle, featured four innovative bookshelves -- two on each side -- that rotated inside or outside. On nice days, borrowers browsed books from the street or sidewalk. In bad weather, they went inside the truck."
  
• "Mobile library spreads joy of reading," via the Middle East North Africa Financial Network (Jordan)
  "The Ministry of Culture on Tuesday officially inaugurated its mobile library project for 2011-2012, with the aim of promoting literacy and cultural exposure across the Kingdom."
• "Mobile Library brings joy of learning to children in China" via 4-traders
  "A mobile library funded by a Finnish foundation began its journey to schools for migrant children in China."
• Printable 3-D paper bookmobile (hey, whaddya mean, "relic of a bygone era?" Maybe for readers of the New Yorker, Bob, but we're still on the road where there is a need!)
• In case you didn't like that paper bookmobile, here's another.
  
• "Project Sophia Mobile Library--Books without borders for post-conflict children in Indonesia" via the Peace and Collaborative Development Network
  "The Sophia mobile library is basically a library in a vehicle, moving from village to village. The library vehicle, which also known as “the magic box,” contains storybooks for children and teenagers, textbooks, drawing books, stationaries, puzzles, origami, Indonesian children's movies, and children's songs." One of its objectives is to "open a space for intensive and massive communications across generation between various ethnics and religions which allow dialogue to occur and in the end would contribute to the joint effort in building peace."
• "Bookmobile driver shares joy of books on route," via the San Francisco Chronicle
  "She chats up the students, stokes their enthusiasm about new titles (" 'The Great Rabbit Rescue' comes out in December!") and at one stop reads a spooky Halloween story, "Bone Soup," out loud to the children. Most are the children of ranch owners and ranch workers; Jones knows each one by name. Jorge, a fifth-grader, is hooked on the Percy Jackson series, which retells Greek myths. Megan, a sixth-grader, is big in 4-H and searching for books on chickens [....] In the summertime when kids are not in school, we have 10 ranch stops. It keeps the kids reading for the summer, which is really important. We also get some of the single men who work on the ranches, and some of the moms take advantage of the materials to learn English."
• "The Lumberjack's Boxcar Library," via Exile Bibliophile
  "Beginning in 1919, this railroad boxcar was refitted to be a library on rails to serve the mobile timber camps in western Montana [....] It was in use into the late 1950s as a library by the Anaconda Company. After that, it was used by the University of Montana at one of their lumber research stations-- first as a library then as a dormitory. It was later used for storage, until it was discovered by the museum and acquired for restoration and interpretation of the timber history of the region."
• "Baldwin County's Bookmobile: Library on Wheels," via Alabama Live
  "Bookmobile patrons include [people at] retirement centers, retirement homes, assisted-living facilities, day-care centers, public and private schools that do not have an adequate library, the Association for Retarded Citizens, and some stops that are literally in the middle of nowhere. In remote areas, like Hubbard’s Landing north of Stockton, the Bookmobile stops at a fire station, post office, store or community center. Use of the Bookmobile has grown over the years," and the community now has 48 stops.
• "Our libraries deserve your 'yes'," via the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
  "We lived in one of the more obscure suburbs of Philadelphia then, and there was no library. But the library came to us in the Bookmobile. The Bookmobile was the coolest vehicle ever, a building with a steering wheel. When I was 3, if you had offered me the choice of someday driving a Ferrari or the Bookmobile, I would have snubbed the overgrown Matchbox bauble and gone for the literary bus."