Finding & Keeping Books on Your RV Travels

If you’re not too old to remember the 1960’s "Batman" TV show, you might recall Roddy McDowall cast in the villainous role of "Bookworm." This bad guy’s locus of activity was, not surprisingly, "The Bookmobile." Seems that McDowall’s character wasn’t the only one who liked his ‘tomes to go,’ plenty of fulltimers are inveterate readers. "Where," cry the newbies, "Can we find books on the road? And where can we put ‘em?"

Finding books on the road isn’t as difficult as it might appear. Yes, there are public libraries everywhere; many have policies that allow books to be lent out to "non residents." Of course, if you’re just passing through, borrowing a book from the local library might not work out. Hold tight, there are a lot of other places to look for reading material.

We’ve found a ready source of books in many towns are book exchange stores, most of whom specialize in paperbacks. These typically "barter" books, asking a small percentage of the books you "buy" in cash. But freebies abound: Many RV parks have "take a book, leave a book" areas; some laundramats in high RV traffic areas provide a similar service. Public library "friends" groups often have a shelf area in the library where books are sold inexpensively or given away.

Keeping books on board the RV is largely a matter of space. If you have room in a cabinet, so much the better. But in our case, we ran out of cabinet space long before we ran out of books to shelve. I constructed a bookshelf to accomodate paperbacks, but driving around corners would empty the shelves. To keep them in place when rolling down the road, I added a special bracket:

A wooden dowel, as wide as the bookshelf, acts as a restraint to keep the books penned in. To hold it in place, brass welding rod is cut and bent to form two hangers--one on each end of the dowel. Each hanger is bent so that one end pokes into a hole drilled in the end of the dowel, the other into a similar hole drilled into the side of the bookshelf.