12 episodes · 5h 5m
The Bookmobile
One patron, one request, and what they were really looking for. The county bookmobile, forty-one stops every two weeks, and the woman who drove it.
Read the back cover
From nineteen fifty-four to nineteen seventy-nine, Imogene drove the county bookmobile in a Minnesota farm county: a used bread truck with shelves on both walls, two thousand books, and a step two feet high.
Each episode is one person who came up that step and asked for a book. A farmer who wanted a book about the ocean. A war bride who wanted anything at all in Dutch. A hired man who took out a western every two weeks and could not read a word of it. The book they asked for was almost never the book they needed, and she found out, slowly, and she found it for them.
Nobody is saved by literature. People are helped by a woman who paid attention and could order things from the state library.