Through the opaque window of the old school bus, we watch as a man with a straw hat and beard deftly maneuvers his black horse-and-buggy across the road to park beside us on the gravel driveway. He sets down the reins, hops down from the driver’s seat, walks around the side, and unlatches the door. A gaggle of children burst out and start sprinting across the driveway to the bus with such energy that even their heavy backpacks fail to slow them down.
We had hitched a ride on Wayne County Public Library’s Bookmobile, a school bus that has been transformed into a mobile library capable of providing the most remote regions of Ohio’s Wayne County with books. The central compartment, where rows of seats once were, is now a miniature library aisle with bookshelves lining both sides and a check-out desk in the back of the bus. Many of the libraries we had visited on our trip had decommissioned their bookmobiles because of funding cuts, but Wayne County’s was too precious to spare: Their Bookmobile is the second highest-circulating branch library out of the eight branches across the county. That’s because the Bookmobile serves the local Amish population – one of the largest in the country – who are incredibly voracious readers.
We push our backs up against the bookshelf, trying our best to get out of the way of the dozen-or-so Amish children who board the bus in a flurry. They form lines at the front and back of the bus, where they deposit their book-filled bags for the three librarians awaiting their returns. Having disposed of their hauls, the children eagerly start running around the bus and pulling books off the shelves. Another buggy pulls up and more children filter in. The bus gets so crowded that the children have to step on their tippy toes to avoid knocking into one another.
“This is an average-to-slow stop for us,” says Denny, the former truck driver who now drives the Bookmobile. Denny and his crew drive to 70 stops across Wayne County every week, checking out hundreds of books each day at Amish grocery stores, Amish schools, and even homes of Amish families who volunteer their driveways as stops, like the one we are presently parked on. “We are about the Amish,” Denny says. “We don’t choose a location – the Amish request it and the Bookmobile agrees if there are at least eight people who will come.”
Most schools have their own libraries, Denny tells us while we stand with him at the front, watching the children fill up their arms with books. “But Amish schools, which are usually the size of a cottage, are too small to have their own.” Not only that, but their practice of rejecting modern technology means that it’s difficult for the Amish to travel long distances to go, for example, to the library, or to access books and other information online. That means the Bookmobile is even more important for the Amish community. “If it wasn’t for us,” Denny says, “the Amish wouldn’t have access to these books.”
A young girl with two long braids throws a stack of books almost as tall as she is in front of Denny. He smiles and starts scanning them. “Books about horses are very popular with this crowd,” he says as he scans several paperbacks with various majestic horses on the covers. “The kids love animal-themed fiction and graphic novels like Lucky Luke.” Amish adults use the Bookmobile, too, he adds. The women usually check out romance; the men, history and biography. There’s even a cookbook swap, where patrons put a cookbook they’re done with on the shelf, and take a new one to try out new recipes.
“Books on the Bookmobile always get more worn out because the whole family reads it when someone brings it home,” Betty Wilkin, the President of the Friends of the Library tells us when we visited the main branch of the Wayne County Public Library later that day.
At the main library, I spoke with a woman who teaches an Aspire class to help adults get a GED, the equivalent of a high school diploma. She told me that she gets about four to five Amish people in her class every year. “I get the ones who want to jump the fence,” she said. “Amish schools only go through eighth grade, so the Amish who want to leave their community often need to get a GED.”
The Aspire class is in jeopardy, though, the teacher said. As a federally funded program, their funding and status has been in limbo ever since the Trump administration dissolved the Department of Education. The program is likely being moved to the Department of Labor, she said, but when that happens, the students might have to start proving that they are legally here.
Despite being a service for almost 100 years, the Bookmobile’s future is also uncertain. A librarian at the main branch told us that she is not sure if the bus would survive the censorship laws that are looming in Ohio. The State’s 2025 draft budget included a clause requiring that “material related to sexual orientation or gender identity or expression” be put out of sight of minors as a condition to receive funding.1 Like the adult-only public library in Donnelly, Idaho, where the single room library was physically unable to accommodate minors in the face of a similar law, the Bookmobile might also have to close its doors to children. Thankfully, the librarian said, the clause was overturned by the Governor, but there is growing fear that censorship campaigns might gain more traction.
That night, staying with the nephew of a dear, late friend, Ollie and I were reminded of what a librarian at the very first library we visited had told us: Libraries meet people at their point of need. Wayne County’s Bookmobile, we reflected, had taken that maxim to a new level. After having driven more than half way across the country visiting libraries, we thought we’d seen it all. But the Wayne County Bookmobile showed us that public libraries are as diverse as the multitude of Americans they serve.
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Carmen Vintro
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“Ohio libraries celebrate veto of budget measure censoring materials”, Ohio Capital Journal, July 1, 2025, https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2025/07/01/ohio-libraries-celebrate-veto-of-budget-measure-censoring-materials/.
That horse-and-buggy bookmobile is just classic ! Thanks for sharing !