I’ve been doing this traveling bookstore business for eight years now, but there are still surprises. This afternoon while scrolling Twitter (and no, I don’t know what’s happening to the #birdsite), someone posted a photo of my bookstore. I won’t bother describing the Tweet in words because here’s a screenshot.
Over two thousand ‘likes.’ I don’t know what this means and, yes, it surprised me. I can’t imagine this many individuals liking my traveling bookstore without first experiencing it in person. They didn’t chance upon it while ambling down a street in White Sulphur Springs, MT or San Francisco, CA or Smiths Grove, KY. They didn’t spy it parked amongst the food trucks at the Brooklyn Book Festival or the South Dakota Book Festival. They weren’t drawn into this van/bookstore with curiosity when it was set up in Lincoln, NE on a summer’s day when it was over 100°F or in Morgantown, WV when it was raining so hard there was a forecast of flooding.
Obviously this traveling bookstore can’t hold two thousand people if they showed up at the same time or even on the same day. It’s something of a squeeze really to have 2-3 people inside at once – unless they are small children in which case it might fit 4-5. And there is no way at all I can manage having a conversation with two thousand people. I mean I try to limit dinner parties to four or five because it’s just plain difficult to seriously talk with more people than that in a gathering. Perhaps the two thousand could form small groups and talk together while I tried to direct individuals to where the art books are located (back of the van on the bottom shelf), or where they might find an Arabic-English dictionary (top shelf to your left).
Perhaps these ‘likes’ aren’t for the endearing photo of the traveling bookstore at all, a photo taken by Jack DeWitt one early spring morning in Kalispell, MT (2015). He told me the light would be good that time of day especially if I drove the bookstore into a field (which was a bit daunting as I was still new to driving it then). I parked, pulled the door open, and set up the entrance as if I were at an event. Then Jack began taking photos, telling me to stand back to not cast shadows. And now here is that photo on Twitter. Perhaps the ‘likes’ aren’t for this particular photo, but for the words, tickling those who love reading, who can imagine going to any length for a good book. Perhaps that means walking through Portland rain to get to Mother Foucault’s Bookshop, or rummaging too long (despite allergies) at a library book sale in a musty warehouse because of all the great deals, or getting nearly hopelessly lost trying to visit The Strand because one must go there when in NY. And, now that I’m off on that tangent, I think of Second Edition Books in Butte, MT which if you are going across on I-90 you really must experience.
Amazing Traveling Bookstore 
Rita, it’s a meme that’s intended as a funny way of saying “I can’t resist books.” I saw it last week with another picture, a sketch or photo of a van with its rear doors open to display a van full of shelved books (not yours). And yes, I thought of you. In England they have a running joke about commercial vans, white ones in particular, as the vehicle of choice for disreputable criminality. (See “white van” on Urban Dictionary for some people’s associations with the term.) I think what happened here is that someone wanted to create afresh the meme that they’d seen or heard about, Googled “books van” or some such phrase, and came up with the photo of your traveling bookstore. For better or worse, there’s nothing personal about all those “likes.” Each means something along the lines of “This is funny” or “I like books too much for my own good, too!” Now if only they’d actually encounter your white-van bookstore, they’d realize that there’s nothing to be scared about!
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It just feels odd to be part of a meme. I see memes on social media of course, but they are words or images that are public fair, nothing personal. To see my bookstore as one felt extremely disconcerting. I felt I needed to reclaim it, thus the post.
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