C’est Fantastique! Mobilelivre Rolls into Town
by Kathryn Antognini

You can tell a book by its cover, according to the directors of the Mobilivre-Bookmobile project, a mini-bookfair which visited Oberlin for several days last week. The traveling library, housed inside a silver 1959 Airstream Overlander, features art-books and ’zines made out of floppy disks, matchboxes and Velcro, some the size of your thumb.
Run in part by Oberlin grads Ginger Brooks Takahashi (OC ’99) and Fereshteh Toosi (OC ’98), the Bookmobile made a sentimental stop at Oberlin along its summer tour across America. It was open for several days while the coordinators gave free book-binding and ’zine making workshops to the public.
“It’s nice to come back to Oberlin and show students what they have the potential to do,” Takahashi said as she stretched out in the grass outside of the Overlander. Takahashi became involved in the project last year shortly after the mobile’s conception. It was founded by two Montreal art students, Onya Hogan and Beth Stuart, who wanted to introduce bookmaking and ’zines to people outside of the art-book scene. “After a show we put together in ’98, I first realized how closed off from the rest of the world bookmaking is,” Hogan said.
As their dream quickly became a reality, Hogan and Stuart received a modest grant from a self-education committee in Philadelphia and organized a call for submissions. A jury of artists, activists and press chose 300 books from the 500 they received based on how the author creatively manipulated the form of her book. “We were looking for unconventional books that are unique in some way,” Hogan said.

The fruit of their effort is a little curiosity shop of books that seem to have evolved from their Barnes and Noble’s ancestors, leaving their primal paper and cardboard skins behind. There’s so much to see here: a book in the shape of a grilled cheese sandwich about the significance of a grilled cheese sandwich in the author’s love life, a flipbook of photographs that follows the author on moving day into his new apartment, a book that ruminates on what it would be like to have a hand made only of pinkies, a book so small you need a magnifying glass to read it. Visitors eagerly pick up anything that catches their eye like kids in a candy shop.
Takahashi says the most rewarding aspect of her job is “talking with people who are enthusiastic about what we do...people can take something back with them.” She and the other coordinators have had a wonderful summer, driving from small town to big city and crashing with friends along the way. But their tour hasn’t been free of glitches.
The small grants and donations they have received are barely enough to cover their expenses. The mobile will not be able to make it across the Rockies to Los Angeles as planned because of problems with their truck. But according to Takahashi, these setbacks “aren’t really big enough” to overwhelm the positive aspects of their trip.
“The biggest thing is seeing people coming to the bookmobile and being inspired by what they see,” Takahashi said.