National Library Outreach Day: On Bookmobiles and Fugitive Libraries

This week is American Library Association's National Library Week, a time to celebrate library workers and outreach efforts, and promote library use and support. Wednesday, April 7th is National Library Outreach Day or the Day Formerly Known as Bookmobile Day. 

The bookmobile pictured above dates back to BPL's outreach efforts in the 1950s, a beauty known as the "Library on Wheels." The borough's first, its maiden voyage was in October 1951. According to reporting in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, it carried 2,500 volumes, 6 librarians, and made 19 regular stops in an effort to "enable both children and adults to enjoy free library service in areas not now served by regular branches." In 1951, this included locations at Dupont and Manhattan Aves. in Greenpoint, the Marcy Houses off Park Avenue in Bed-Stuy, Wortman Avenue at Hemlock St. near East New York, and Cortelyou and Argyle Roads in Ditmas Park.  

Talking bookmobiles today gives us occasion to celebrate future-building projects rooted in historical responses to oppression like Alexis Pauline Gumbs' Black Feminist Bookmobile. It also necessitates a discussion of the ways in which bookmobiles have historically been stopgap measures for bringing books and services to Black communities and communities of color when libraries still enforced white supremacist segregation.

While public libraries do strive to serve all members of their communities, this has not always been the case, complicating the notion of the "last free, inclusive, truly democratic spaces in American cities and towns" and rightly acknowledging the ways in which public library spaces have been used to uphold racial inequity. New School Professor of Anthropology Shannon Mattern's piece on fugitive libraries is an excellent primer on this history, and how communities have responded by creating their own independent, itinerant libraries. 

Today, the mission of BPL's Bookmobile Fleet is to expand the library's reach to areas without access to branches and provide services and spaces to historically underserved communities. And in our current situation, we are especially interested in creating partnerships with organizations in neighborhoods hardest hit by the pandemic to provide these resources in a safe, and effective way. 

Brooklyn Public Library's very own podcast Borrowed has a number of episodes highlighting the library's dynamic outreach efforts. You can find them here, and view more digitized photos of BPL's first bookmobile here while you listen.

Interested in seeing more photos from CBH’s collections? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images, or the digital collections portal at Brooklyn Public Library. We look forward to inviting you to CBH in the future to research in our entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections. In the meantime, please visit our resources page, or access the resources of the former Brooklyn Collection. Our reference staff are still available to help with your research! You can reach us at cbhreference@bklynlibrary.org.