Why Melanie Moore Drives the Book Bus

“D id you see the boy who took three books? He hates to read,” says Maria Schappert, program director at the Notre Dame Urban Education Center, as we stand outside by the long, narrow garden full of blooming flowers and sprouting vegetables. “He took the books to his desk, and he told his tutor, I want to read this one first! ”

I’ve come to the education center in Covington to donate books with Melanie Moore, owner of the Cincinnati Book Bus —a nonprofit that’s part mobile bookstore and part brick-and-mortar store. All Book Bus profits go toward purchasing new books for local schools and literacy organizations. Today, Moore is delivering just over $1,000 worth of brand-new books.

“When I first talked to Melanie, I said the books don’t have to be new. She said, Yes they do ,” says Schappert, shrugging and smiling. Since Moore launched the Book Bus in 2018, her organization has donated more than $225,000 worth of new books to schools and education programs.

When Moore first conceived the Book Bus, she wasn’t thinking of donating anything. Nor was she envisioning a mobile bookstore. She was finishing up 25 years of teaching, mostly seventh and eighth grade in subsidized private schools located in low-income areas, and she knew she wanted something new. “I’d kind of done everything I set out to do as a teacher,” she says. “I loved all 25 years and wanted to end on a high note. But I felt that nudge. And when a teacher feels that nudge, it’s time to go.”

A lifelong reader who’d grown up going to libraries—even to the point of visiting public libraries when on vacation—Moore carried an affection for the written word into her own family as an adult. She and her daughters were part of the mother/daughter book club at the now-defunct Blue Manatee Children’s Bookstore as the girls grew up. “There was always this love of literature and love of books,” she says. “I enjoy sharing that love, and it just organically grew into wanting to open a bookstore and share books with people.”

Moore went to what she calls “bookseller’s bootcamp” in Florida (Bookstore Training Group, run by Paz and Associates) and came close to signing a lease on brick-and-mortar store, and then she woke up in the middle of the night deeply uneasy. Why was she sinking so much capital and time into a venture she didn’t even know if she’d like? It didn’t feel right. The next morning, she told her husband, “Nope, we’re not going to sign this lease. I’m putting everything on hold.”

A few months later, Moore finished the novel Parnassus on Wheels , originally published in 1917 and still in print, which tells the story of a moving bookstore . She was sitting in her kitchen, sipping a cup of tea, when she looked out to her driveway and spotted her husband’s vintage pickup truck, a mint-green 1962 Volkswagen with a ton of charm and no power steering. Inspiration struck, and the Book Bus was born. She even visualized the logo.

The venture was appealing because it used materials she already had, offering an opportunity to dip her toes into the world of bookselling with minimal start-up costs and maximum flexibility. “I thought, If I bust, what am I out, some time? ” she says.

The business began to feel exciting, doable, and fun. But it was still a gamble: The Book Bus was cute, but would anyone like it? The books on the truck were carefully curated, but would anyone buy them? On her first night out with the Book Bus, full of stock she’d selected and shined up for the public, she called her sister. “I told her if I sold just one book, I would be happy,” says Moore.

People did buy the books, and within three months Moore had paid herself back the start-up costs. It was around that time that she met a third-grade teacher from the west side whose classroom didn’t have a library.

M oore donated $500 to jumpstart the classroom library, then hatched a scheme to shuffle proceeds from selling books to help other teachers. The idea quickly morphed into a business plan to donate all Book Bus profits to buy books for schools, she says, “just because I loved that first experience so much.” A photograph of that first group of kids, faces covered by the hardback books they’re holding high, is still on Moore’s website under the heading “Make a Donation.”

Today, the Book Bus operation includes a storefront in Sharonville, the Book Bus Depot, in addition to the Book Bus, named Tilly. Moore does not take a salary and has no paid employees. She typically donates books in blocks of $1,000 or more, but the donation logistics have remained basically the same: People approach her in informal ways through social media or friends, and Moore purchases books through the same distributors she uses to stock the bookstore, with no special discounts. She has the books shipped to her house, where she inspects each one personally before delivering them herself to the organization.

When delivering the books, Moore also takes pictures and tells the stories of her donations to her online Book Bus Community, which spans the U.S. and, during COVID, made up the bulk of her sales via website transactions. “I do it all,” she says. “I’m the social media person, the bookkeeper, the buyer, and the delivery person.”

In the case of the Urban Education Center, Director of Development Erin Woods made the connection. “I heard about Melanie through my friend and reached out,” she says. Moore made an initial $1,000 donation in 2022, including some gardening books since the garden program Schappert had started the year before was flourishing.

“The year after we started the garden, Melanie came with this amazing batch of books,” says Schappert. “Here we are a year later, and she’s helping us again.” Walking into the Urban Education Center, I notice the donated garden books lined up in a room at the front, supplemented by other gardening books the center already had.

In fact, the center is awash in books, though many are old. “It’s a constant need to update our offerings and our range of material to the students, and it needs to be relevant,” says Woods. “Melanie brings that to the table for us.” Sister Maria Therese, executive director of the center, agrees. “We listen to what the kids are saying and what they want. Melanie has been a godsend for our kids.”

This time around, what the kids said they wanted were more books featuring children who looked like them, especially featuring Black characters. “ Hair Love !” cries one child. “Lola!” cries another. Moore unpacks books from the boxes, and they’re clutched to chests, smiles spreading across faces. “Can we take these home?”

“Children need to see themselves in their books,” says Moore. “A lot of what I do right now is purchase multicultural books to update the collections of education centers, libraries, or classrooms.”

In some cases, like the Urban Education Center, the organization will provide a list of requested titles, which Moore will fulfill and supplement. “I can never just do half a list,” she says, laughing. In other cases, the organization will describe a general need, and Moore will create a list of titles in response. This summer, for instance, the Book Bus provided 100 books to kids participating in a Faith Alliance summer program. “They provide the lunch, and I provide the books,” she says. “Since this is summer reading, my main goal at this point is just to get the kids excited about reading. I’ll put in whatever is hot for kids, whatever they want to have in their hands. There will probably be some Dog Man in there, plus some graphic novels.”

Book donations are always targeted to the individual organization, Moore says. “Who you are serving and what do you need? Are your kids reading on grade level or below level? Do they need bilingual books, cultural books, nonfiction books?”

Moore describes a significant donation idea for North Avondale Montessori in 2023 that happened while she was communicating with librarian Paulette Simpson about something else over Facebook Messenger and suddenly wrote, I can make a donation of $10,000. What do you need? Simpson immediately thought of the school’s social studies and science nonfiction books that were sorely out of date. As each hard-back library-bound nonfiction book can run about $40, that $10,000 translated into around 250 new books.

Simpson recalls how quickly the idea turned into actual books. “I had no idea that the entire $10,000 donation would be exclusively for my school,” she says. Moore arrived in the Book Bus, where she was greeted by kindergarteners holding up homemade signs saying “Thank you!”

T he Book Bus community is central to the entire operation. “Every time I donate books, it’s on behalf of the community,” says Moore. “I have the idea and I have the truck, but without the Book Bus community I’m just a girl with an idea and a truck and I can’t do anything.” Financial support fuels Moore’s book donations, and she thinks that people like to buy from her because they know “when they buy a book with me, they’re also buying a book for a child.”

The community emphasis appears in the children’s book that Moore and friends Mike Helm (artist) and Brian Wray (writer) published earlier this year, The Book Bus (Schiffer Kids) . In the story, a light-green VW truck, also called Tilly, finds purpose and pleasure by delivering books to people around her community. Tilly delivers in rural areas, cities, and small towns. And when her crates are empty and children still want to read, “the most sensational sight” comes forward: smiling adults with their hands full of books, giving them away to the children. “That’s really what the community means to me,” says Moore. “We’re really in this together.”

During COVID, Moore’s online book group grew to about 150 people, turning the Book Bus community into a national phenomenon. But with pandemic restrictions waning and the Book Bus Depot opening, the bulk of her sales are now local. The Sharonville shop, at 10936 Reading Road, is open 11 a.m.–3 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday, except for Saturday, when it opens at 10 a.m. Moore is there most of the time, but there’s also a crew of 25 volunteers helping at the store. They check out customers, take donations, and prepare packages for the online book group. Volunteering is so popular that Moore has a waiting list. “I couldn’t ask for a better team around me,” she says.

A significant part of her information-sharing happens online, where she maintains a chatty presence on multiple social media platforms, offering “fun photo Fridays,” book recommendations, promotions for upcoming events, and details about each donation drop-off.

At the Urban Education Center, for instance, Moore turns to me and says, “Please grab some photos for my social media post.” I oblige, wondering if my pictures will do the job. I take pictures of children clutching books and smiling, hands reaching for books spread out on an open table, and Moore hugging a girl whose request for more books with characters who look like her initiated the donation.

“This afternoon I had the pleasure of dropping off $1,053 worth of new books to Notre Dame Urban Education Center,” Moore writes in the subsequent post. “They provide free tutoring for local students. This donation began with a young girl, Sha’myrah, who was asked to get a book from the center’s library to read with her tutor but came back empty-handed. She wanted to read a book with a Black girl character and couldn’t find one. The center compiled a list of books from the students’ wish list and then reached out to me to see if I could donate them. I was happy to oblige! Sha’myrah literally jumped up and down when I brought in the books.”

Moore says her “salary” is the feeling she gets when she donates books to children. “When I can spread the love and joy of books and I can see that expressed on a kid’s face, that’s what carries me through all these long, hard workdays. And I want to be able to snap pictures and share with the Book Bus community: Look what we’ve done! Look what you helped me do! ”

As the kids dig into the books in a happy state of pandemonium at the Covington education center, Moore gravitates toward Ashaya, a cousin of Sha’myrah who is also an avid reader. Just 6 years old, Ashaya is reading aloud with Moore one of the books that excites her the most, Hair Love . Moore praises her reading skills.

Ashaya is also excited to see several new books featuring Lola, a young Black girl who features in the nine-book series written by Anna McQuinn and illustrated by Rosalind Beardshaw. When asked what makes Lola so great, Ashaya says, “She always makes good choices.” She flipped open the book about Lola adopting a cat, which she’d already read, to one of her favorite moments: Lola practicing how to take care of a cat with her stuffed kitty, which then prepares her for interacting with her real kitty.

“These books are fun,” says Ashaya. “I read them all the time.” Moore agrees, noting that Lola is one of her most frequently donated series. “I like them because they just show a little girl doing normal things,” she says. “Going on a hike, planting a garden, going to the library, adopting a cat, whatever. They’re just normal books.”

While bookworms like Ashaya know just what they want from the Book Bus haul, other kids who normally couldn’t care less about reading find themselves excited and engaged. That’s often the case, says Moore, and part of the reason why fresh new books are such a necessary piece of the puzzle.

In one of her favorite recent stories, a preschooler on the west side was gifted one of Moore’s donation books. In her post for social media, Moore described what the book meant to the child, noting that his mom said “he hadn’t parted with the book since arriving home from school. His teacher had never seen him so gentle with a book before.” Moore tells me, “That just means so much. That’s why I do what I do.”

Another story of donations with a big impact occurred at Riverview East High School, where teacher Kristen Carter had the idea of sponsoring a club that would meet every Tuesday for lunch to read and discuss books. The club began with 15 core members in 2022, and many of them stayed involved from their sophomore year through graduation in May. One of the members of that club was the first in her family to graduate from high school, while others were the first in their families to go to college.

The students and Carter selected a new book after each old book was finished, and Moore provided members with copies of each title. Their final book, a going-to-college gift from their teacher, was a copy of Tuesdays With Morrie. They later visited the Book Bus Depot as a group, and Moore invited each student to choose a book from her inventory and then grab a coffee at Moonflower Coffee Collective next door. “It was so meaningful just to sit back and watch them talk about books with each other and pick out their own books,” she says.

Access and ownership made a huge difference with the high schoolers, just as it did with the preschoolers, which paved the way for sharing their love of books and reading. That shift in attitude is what motivated Moore to get into the book business in the first place. “It all just seems to happen naturally,” she says. “Sometimes I meet people and ask them to message me. Others just reach out to me or send an e-mail out of the blue. I’d say 90 percent of the process happens organically. It just flows. It just works.”

While there are overwhelming moments and times when Moore needs to take a step back—for instance, she typically does her last donation run in November or early December to Lighthouse Youth Services so she can turn her full attention to the Book Bus Depot holiday rush—in general, the balance of resources and needs tends to even out. She launched the store uncertain if she’d sell even one book from her crazy bookstore-on-wheels, but she’s been successful beyond her wildest dreams. She raises more money for book donations and expansion each year and maintains the freedom to tailor each donation to the needs of the organization requesting support.

“You just kind of open your heart, and it comes naturally,” says Moore. “Any time I have money to donate, I get the right thing and I spend it. Then I’m on to the next thing.”

The post Why Melanie Moore Drives the Book Bus appeared first on Cincinnati Magazine .