The United States is in a literacy crisis. In 2023, a survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics found that 28% of American citizens ages 16–65 read below the equivalent of a third-grade level. Another study, based on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest American Time Use Survey, indicated that 16% of adults read for pleasure on a given day in 2023, down from a high of 28% in 2004. Meanwhile, library funding is increasingly threatened, screen time is adversely affecting students’ reading abilities, and swaths of the country have become bookstore deserts. But one group of dedicated citizens hoping to counteract the trend is peddling into local parks on book bikes.
Katrin Abel, a librarian at Austin Public Library in Texas who has researched the history of bookmobiles, started to see book bikes take off about a decade ago. “They’re small, they’re nimble, they’re able to get places where you might not expect to see the library and get to people who might not come to the library,” she says. In the years since Abel took note of the trend, a steady supply of general-interest book bikes—mainly run by librarians—have appeared alongside individual operators bringing more niche literary offerings to the streets, such as the Nonbinarian Book Bike, a mutual aid project giving out free queer books across Brooklyn that has since expanded into a physical store.
In Maryland, readers know love is in the air when L’amour en Route rides across Montgomery County. Driving the romance-themed book bike is Jeanette Thompson, who recently launched Romantique Books, an online romance book store. “I knew that opening a bricks-and-mortar was not gonna be in the cards anytime soon, but I wanted to expand and get out into the community more and not just do pop-ups,” she says. She describes her venture as “a bit of a rebellious act” against Project 2025, which she believes unfairly targets parts of the romance genre by decrying a number of titles as pornography.
Thompson has found a sweet spot vending at farmer’s markets, where she sets people up with hand-wrapped, undisclosed titles for a “blind date with a book.” “I usually include a few goodies—stickers, bookmarks, and stuff like that,” she adds. In the future, she plans to curate events, including by working with a local brewery to pair beers with books featuring various romance tropes. “I really love romance and I don’t think enough people focus on it,” she says. “It’s really exciting to see this kind of thing happening.”
Reading meets sustainability in Iowa City with a library book bike that stocks titles tackling climate-related issues. The Iowa City Public Library acquired the bike through funding from a local climate action organization. “We take the discards from the library and donated materials from the public and try to put them back into use—trying to deter things from the landfill—and make sure that usable materials are used,” says Katie Roche, development director for the ICPL Friends Foundation.
Roche set up a relationship between the ICPL and the local landfill so that residents can self-sort their donations to send books that match necessary criteria to the library. As a result, Roche says, the library is “seeing a huge amount of books that would have been recycled go back into reuse.” ICPL’s bike also provides library workers with a natural opportunity to discuss attacks on libraries that local residents might not be aware of. This is especially important, Roche adds, because “Iowa is number one in book banning and number one in legislation that would challenge the good work of libraries.”
Comics artist Shay Mirk, whose next book, Making Nonfiction Comics: A Guide for Graphic Narrative, will be published by Abrams in November, has taken an even more DIY tack to the book bike endeavor. Over the summer, Mirk took their custom zine bike to a Pride event in Portland, Ore., where it was immediately a hit. “I had brought hundreds of zines, and they were gone within an hour,” they say.
