???When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes???
-Erasmus

???It??™s here!??? I heard my friend say as I picked up the phone. 

???Be there in 10 minutes,??? I said as I hung up and went flying out the screen door as only a twelve year old can. My mother yelled after me, ???Don??™t slam the door!??? but it was too late.

I hurried down the road to meet my girlfriend.   It was summer break, school had been out for a couple of weeks, and now the bookmobile was here!

Like opening the doors of the wardrobe in C.S. Lewis??™ Narnia series, so it was to enter the huge enclosed bus-like vehicle and reach up to the shelf, open a book, and enter another world.

The bookmobile came to our town during the summer and it was always parked next to the curb, sideways, taking up several parking spaces in front of the Baring Hotel.  There were bicycles along the curb also as children showed up to check out books.  I would usually see people outside visiting with each other as they waited because there wasn??™t room for everyone to be inside at the same time. It was a social event as well as a chance to check out new reading material. The bookmobile had air-conditioning, at least when it wasn??™t on the fritz, so most people weren??™t in a great hurry to leave anyway since nobody in our town had air conditioning back then.

We had books in our home and a library in our small school but the bookmobile brought a variety of books on almost any subject you could think of, from biographies to historical novels. If you wanted a book that wasn??™t there, the librarian would write it down and try to bring it on the bookmobile??™s next trip.

Many people in rural areas had very little access to books unless they traveled to a larger town.  In the 1950s there wasn??™t a Hastings, Barnes & Noble, or even a Wal-Mart with a book section nearby like there is today.

My love of books probably came from my parents who liked to read and my mother being a schoolteacher may have had a lot to do with it too.  She began teaching in a one-room schoolhouse and finished her career as a school librarian so books were always around our house.

It wasn??™t long until I had read most of the books that were at home and in the classrooms at school.  Some of us were hooked on reading from the day our first grade teacher, Miss Marie, taught us ???See Spot run!  Run! Run! Run!???

After the Dick and Jane books, I had moved on through all the series books such as Cherry Ames, Nancy Drew, and Little House on the Prairie.  We yearned for more reading material and I remember my cousin once managed to borrow her sister??™s book, Gone With The Wind, and we both read it when we were only 12 years old.  Now that we had the bookmobile, we knew we would be able to read more such books.

Although we think of the bookmobile as beginning in the 1950s, the idea had been around a long time. I have been told that books were once distributed to schools and communities by horse-drawn wagons. After World War II books were sometimes carried in the trunks of cars to different areas.  Later, before specifically designed bookmobiles were in existence, school buses were converted for that purpose.

The bookmobile no longer comes to town but we still have libraries. Books are always better than the movies they create from them because there is a lot more detail than can be put into a two-hour film. As author John Le Carre once said, ???Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.???

Years ago, before television and video games, families would have ???reading time??? together. This summer why not turn off the TV, get out some of the classics like Tom Sawyer or Little Women and read with your children or grandchildren. If you don??™t have the books, your local library does

You may not have a magic wardrobe or a bookmobile but if you just open a good book and begin to read, the book has a magic all it??™s own to transport you to faraway places even though you have not moved from where you sit.

Pamela R. Blaine
pamyblaine @ blaines.us

I've traveled the world twice over,
Met the famous; saints and sinners,
Poets and artists, kings and queens,
Old stars and hopeful beginners,
I've been where no-one's been before,
Learned secrets from writers and cooks
All with one library ticket
To the wonderful world of books.
-Unknown