Photograph by Lance Adkins
Visit Sharonville bookstore The Book Bus Depot on Saturday, March 2 to meet Tilly the Book Bus, a 1962 mint green VW single-cab truck that has been, for the last five years, visiting coffee shops around Cincinnati and providing new children’s books to area schools. Now Tilly has her own book, with a story that’s told by her owner Melanie Moore, who arranges Tilly’s travel schedule and runs The Book Bus Depot, aka Tilly’s headquarters. Moore collaborated with local artist Mike Helm and fellow children’s bookstore owner Brian Wray to bring the story to life.
The Book Bus (Schiffer Publishing) begins with Tilly’s early life on a cherry farm, where she hauls a truck bed loaded with cherry crates during the day and spends her nights in a barn. “It’s all true,” Moore says, noting that the book bus made its initial journey from out west to Ohio so that her husband, a VW afficionado, could repair the engine of the single-cab classic. “When we brought her home, she had all these old cherry crates in the bottom of the truck,” she recalls.
Three years later, inspired by tales of mobile bookstores like Parnassus on Wheels, Moore reimagined the truck as a book bus. The picture book recounts the journey by introducing a young girl who reads in the truck bed at night and inspires Tilly to eventually take cartons of books to local children. When Tilly runs out of books with two would-be readers waiting forlornly by her truck bed, it looks like she’s in trouble. But, just in time, “a group of grown-ups with arms full of colorful books” offer to share their books with the remaining children.
The scene represents The Book Bus’s nonprofit work. “The community came around and supported Tilly and filled her crates back up, which is what I feel the community does for me,” says Moore. “I wanted to show how a community of people could come together to promote literacy.”
In real life, after 25 years of teaching in inner-city schools in California, Missouri, and Ohio, Moore was tired to seeing underfunded libraries. Her vision in The Book Bus Depot was to channel profits from Book Bus sales to purchasing new books for school libraries. And, over the last five years, she’s done just that. To facilitate the nonprofit, all workers at the Book Bus Depot are volunteer and Moore doesn’t take a salary. She now has a national following on social media and is a mainstay in the region’s independent bookstore scene.
From the early days of running The Book Bus, Moore thought the bus’s story would make a great picture book. She turned to writer Brian Wray, a children’s bookstore owner in Vermont who had written children’s books, and artist Mike Helm, who lives in Hyde Park, to make her vision a reality. “From the beginning, I knew I wanted the pictures to feel like art,” she says.
To create the illustrations for The Book Bus, Helm individually painted each spread. The soft green hues of the landscape perfectly frame the appealing book bus and create a calm, soothing atmosphere for the story. My favorite illustration features a full moon casting a silvery glow over the barn that houses Tilly. In the middle of the spread, the girl reader crosses the dark lawn with her flashlight and book as she makes her way to Tilly’s truck bed, where she’ll read the night away.
There’s something about Tilly that draws real children to her. “It’s all Tilly, she’s the star attraction here,” Moore says of the nonprofit’s success. “If I’m out and about, people are drawn to her. The truck is just a showstopper.” My 3-year-old daughter had this reaction to just the picture of Tilly in The Book Bus.
We will be at the shop in person on March 2 (10 a.m.-4 p.m.) to see the real Tilly and have our copy of the book signed by the two authors and illustrator, all of whom will be in attendance. Original artwork from the book will be on display, and the event will include giveaways, activities, and sweet treats compliments of Lulu’s Sweets Boutique.
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