In Indiana: Here Comes the Bookmobile

This was no ordinary bus. Anybody could tell as much from the fact that folks are being welcomed aboard by a human-sized cat of polka-dotted green. The mimic cat, it turns out, is named Readmore. And he—or she, or it—is part of the crew of this onetime school bus that the Indiana department of public instruction has dressed up as a roving Read-A-Rama, or bookmobile. The rig has rolled into leafy Claypool (pop. 464), the smallest of 102 cities and towns on its route, to stir up interest in reading by giving some books away.

Claypoolers straggle through the 40-ft. bookmobile for 2½ hours—young and middle-aged adults, children with and without parents, and a good many grandparents. Inside, shelves flaunt 6,000 paperback volumes of fact, fiction and fancy, skinny picture books for preschoolers, fat classics for the solemn. The "Hardy Boys." The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. A Child's Garden of Verses. Mark Twain. Sinclair Lewis. Bernard Malamud. Dreiser's An American Tragedy. Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. But which one to pick?

The visitors' eagerness to choose something—anything—seems at odds with the widespread notion that nowadays reading is an endangered activity. The townspeople jostle amidst the shelves, teasing and badgering one another to decisions.

The first aboard, Gladys Yarian, assistant cashier at the Claypool branch of the First National Bank of nearby Warsaw, Ind., ambles back to her job across Main Street clutching The Call of the Wild. In her wake, Bank Teller Cindy Leslie carries off Little Women. The Rev. Steve Cain, 30, a Van Gogh beard and casual garb offering no hint that he is pastor of Claypool's United Methodist Church, chooses Marathon Man on the assumption, he says, that this nasty little spy thriller is about running. The Rev. Cain's daughter Rachel, 8, is a small celebrity in Claypool. Year before last, as part of a book-reading contest in the first grade, she was able to dash through 150 volumes, including Uncle Wiggily and The Yearling. Now she picks Laura Wilder's These Happy Golden Years.

Outside in the harsh sunshine, bookmobile workers ply everybody with posters and pins promoting—what else?—reading. Postal Carrier Wendell Brown emerges blinking at the cover of Louis L'Amour's The Burning Hills and waits for his wife Pat, who steps out bearing another L'Amour, The Lonely Men. Says Pat: "I got it for him." A well-fed matron waddles off with the Joy of Cooking.