Bookmobile News

Occasionally the Bookmobile receives donations of titles that just don’t stir anyone’s interest.  It’s not so much the eclectic ones that gather dust, as there are folks out there who appreciate even the narrowest of topics.  It’s more the older fiction that never became popular, by authors who never achieved widespread name recognition.  We were starting to wonder what we would do with these books and had heard a variety of ideas.  Fortunately we met someone at our jazz festival give-away event in Cotati who told us about Books and Balls to Kenya.

Spearheaded by Rancho Cotati Rotary club, with support from Santa Rosa East and Parklands Kenya Rotaries, the effort gathers local donations to ship overseas.  The materials are then used to create new school libraries in Kangundo, Kenya.  We are very excited to support this mission and it seems a great fit: we were able to donate about 30 boxes of older books which Sonoma County readers don’t seem to want but will likely make for good English class curriculum stock.  The children shown in the Rancho Cotati website video (http://www.ranchocotatirotary.org/books-balls.php) generally have to share one book per four students.  Once our donated books arrive, the students will have much more literature with which to practice!

The Public Storage facility on Commerce Boulevard in Rohnert Park will be accepting books for this project for the next few months.  If you want to participate, best to call ahead and make sure they still have space.

This contribution was written by 10-year-old Edgerrin Weaver, one of the younger members of the Free Bookmobile team.

Dear Supporters,

I, for the most part, am having a great time being part of the Bookmobile.  It’s fun and also sometimes not so fun when I get picked up from school and the car is piled high with books.  We even have a storage unit the size of a trailer home.  I think the good part is that I can read any book I want from the trailer and storage unit before we give it away.  It’s also fun to see Carrie come to join and help us.

There are some downs about working with the Bookmobile.  1) Sometimes when we have books in the car and we go on twisty and sharp-turning roads the books fall onto me and Sylvan and it really hurts.  2) Sometimes when we want to go to the park or the movies my dad realizes that we said we were going to go bookmobiling so we can’t go.  3) It can get boring.  One time, we went to Camp Meeker and we only had 2 people come!  Usually, we have 100′s!

Why you should visit us: 1) It’s all free and my dad’s girlfriend makes really cool bookmarks.  2) Take as many as you can carry.  3) We are nice and friendly and we do this because we love and want to support our community!

From,

Edgerrin Weaver

We are excited to announce the publishing of three new photo galleries on our website, the first entries of 2010.  They can be found by clicking on the “Photos” link on the sidebar menu at http://sonomacountybookmobile.org.  We hope they capture the positive atmosphere of our events for those who haven’t yet attended one…and perhaps bring back a few good memories for those who have!

One of our favorite collections of the new year is entitled “Family Portraits”.  We feel that reading together is a wonderful way to strengthen family relationships, and these pictures bear witness to the excitement that both kids and adults experience when they discover new books together.  As one Penngrove mom put it to her teenage son while staggering away with armloads of titles: “Let’s skip lunch and go home and read!”

It has been a fantastic first year for us, and we’re not even close to the twelve-month mark. After finishing some routine tabulation, we realized that we have given away more than 10,000 books to 3,000 individuals throughout Sonoma County. And we did it in less than nine months on the job. Not bad for a weekend operation!

In fact, we gave away our 10,000th book in Bodega Bay at the Fisherman’s Festival last month. Lots of families out there groovin’ to the music and picking out fun stuff to read. Since then we have hosted 7 more events, for a grand total of 61, and brought our book tally to over 11,500. Who knows where we will stand on July 26th, our official anniversary.

There are so many kind people who made this happen, and we hold that gratitude for them on a daily basis. In particular we want to thank our family and friends who have invested blood, sweat, and tears of joy to the project, the loyal groups and organizations which put resources behind our effort, and all the people who have parted ways with their books so that others could enjoy them too. You have all supplied vital ingredients to the magic of the Sonoma County Free Bookmobile!

May we drive onward for a very long time indeed…

We are experiencing our first shortage!  Though we are always in need of high quality books in all categories, we are especially in need of books for young readers (0 – 8 years of age) at the moment, especially large-format picture books that adults and kids often read together.  We are rationing the few we have left but that is not our style – we prefer to send every child away with an armful!

Please take a few minutes to go through the kids’ rooms and box up whatever they are ready to share.  Including our newest drop-off location in Windsor, we now have five locations around the county to which you can bring them.  Check our “Donate Books” page on the website for full addresses.  If none are convenient, please don’t hesitate to email me and we can arrange a meeting or pickup.

We are also often in need of: recent adolescent/teen literature, dictionaries, and foreign language titles (especially in Spanish).

Thank you so very much for your participation!

Thanks to the Windsor Chamber of Commerce and Free Bookmobile supporters Wendy and Rick Langhals, we are delighted to announce that The UPS Store in Windsor has become a partner in hosting a book donation drop-off box.  The Langhals run a clean, well-stocked store in the Safeway shopping center (between Brooks Road South and Lakewood Drive) in downtown Windsor.  The hours are good as well: 8:30 – 6:30 Pm weekdays, and 9 Am – 5 Pm on Saturday.  Full details, including donation guidelines, are listed on our “Donate Books” page, now accessible directly from the front page of our website.

This is a real boost for us as we previously had no north county presence.  We hope this will make it a lot easier for everyone to contribute!

We’ve been having a great time talking to our patrons about The Big Read as we give away copies of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  We particularly enjoyed our time with The Friends of the Petaluma River a couple of weeks ago.  Though younger readers aren’t as familiar with Mark Twain as was my generation, they are usually game for checking it out, and it never hurts to have reminiscing adults near by to describe all the fun they had with the book.

Over at Big Read headquarters, the National Endowment for the Arts folks took notice of the Free Bookmobile’s “Mark Twain Exchange” and conducted a brief interview.  You can check it out at:

http://www.arts.gov/bigreadblog

Though the formal project runs through April, we are, of course, The Big Read all year long!  We’ll be giving away Twain for as long as the good people of Sonoma County keep recycling him through our little trailer…

We have been blessed with strong community support since the beginning.  Even when all we had was an idea, plenty of kind individuals stepped forward to give books, money, time, labor, and well wishes for our project.  Now that we are doing the good deed, we have lots of gratitude to express for the help that makes it all possible.  In honor of our strongest partners, we have published a page that allows visitors to see just who is behind our success.  Please take a moment to check out our “Partners” (a new option on the main sidebar menu) and read about these terrific folks.  You can also click through to their websites to learn more about the individual missions – perhaps even get involved!

We also tuned up our “About Us” page a bit.  As we play with new web design software, the entire site will gradually be enhanced.

We love good press with pretty pictures!  The Sonoma West Times & News, which also publishes The Healdsburg Tribune and The Windsor Times, ran a nice story about The Big Read this week.  As you may have seen in a previous posts, The Big Read is a nationwide effort to boost literacy and get folks talking about a great book.  This year’s project centers around Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and the Free Bookmobile has broadened the appeal by featuring any and all books penned by Twain.

The Sonoma West article covers the ‘mobile prominently, with some great shots of happy patrons picking up books and reader’s guides.  I’m partial to the print version myself, which I believe is running in all three versions of the paper, and you can see the online version here:

http://www.sonomawest.com/articles/2010/04/02/living/doc4bb3c4feeb590287791079.txt

Remember to keep donating all your extra Twain to us so we can spread the love throughout the month of April and beyond!

Big news today: Bread for the Journey Sebastopol has made a $1,000 pledge to our mission, and specifically to kick off a fund-raising drive to purchase a covered, walk-in style Bookmobile. Bread for the Journey is a fantastic group that nurtures neighborhood philanthropy by raising money locally and then offering relationship centered micro-grants. They have volunteer chapters across the nation and after meeting with us, the Sebastopol board members became very enthusiastic about funding our quest for a more suitable vehicle. They are quite literally putting up bread for our journey around the county!

Now that’s where you come in. Theirs is a matching grant: it is cash that will match your investment dollar for dollar. A $10 donation becomes $20, a $25 donation becomes $50, and so on. They are going to double the power of your investment. And what are you investing in? Expanded services, selection, and long-term sustainability. The Free Bookmobile has been welcomed far and wide, everyone goes home happy, and the question we now hear more than any other is “When are you coming back?” Unfortunately, the current trailer is our limiting factor. It was a great way to get started but the heavy book carts must be maneuvered up and down a steep ramp – it’s physically demanding work which I can’t reasonably ask other volunteers to perform. Volunteers could, however, easily drive a box-truck Bookmobile and open the door for patrons. This would mean a significant expansion of events as we recruit folks to give away books on additional days. Our goal is to visit each in the core group of twenty locations at least once per month, and to add schools with closing libraries to our routes. The latter is a crucial gap that needs filling as schools all over the county struggle with vanishing budgets.

There are other substantial benefits to the upgrade. Currently we are able to carry about one thousand books at any given time. A specially modified box-truck would allow us to offer tens of thousands of titles! With proper categorization, we are talking about a real mobile library. The self-contained structure would also permit us to run events in any type of weather and lighting conditions. We have been caught out on a number of occasions by rain and darkness.

Please take a moment right now to click over to the website and contribute to our efforts on the “Help Us!” page. It’s fast, easy, and your donation is tax-deductible through our new partnership with the Literary Arts Guild. Even $10 or $20 will make a big difference.

http://sonomacountybookmobile.org

If you prefer to mail in a check, you can do that! Please make it payable to “Sonoma County Free Bookmobile” and send to:

Literary Arts Guild
PO Box 159
Santa Rosa, CA 95402

Thank you so very much for your support of Sonoma County’s only public-access Bookmobile!