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Rita Collins has taken her bookstore-van, St. Rita’s Amazing Traveling Bookstore and Textual Apothecary, to nearly every state in the U.S. This week, she stopped in Philadelphia for the first time to visit with Drexel graduate students and offer a variety of used books for anyone on campus to browse.
On a sunny afternoon, students squeezed into the bookmobile to look through the wooden shelves. Undergraduate and graduate students alike, from humanities to biology and engineering majors, put a major dent in the inventory — at least temporarily dispelling the notion that Americans, especially young people, don’t want to read.
“Our students are hungry for physical books,” Nomi Eve, author and the director of Drexel’s Master of Fine Arts creative writing program, told WHYY. “Our students want to read books, talk about them with their friends. I know that it’s a wider problem out there, but we’re not seeing it here, which is a beautiful thing.”
Collins told WHYY she’d dreamed of having a bookstore but couldn’t financially support a brick-and-mortar. So in 2015, from a run-down van, she started gathering and selling books near her small town in Montana. Before long, people started asking her to go further and further out, and she’s now visited more than 40 states and met readers of all ages and backgrounds.
