Library in a Milk Crate: Reading on the Road

The Library is in there - somewhere

No matter how exciting a life on the road is, life without books is unimaginable. Back in the day, when we lived in a house, in a town, with a library, we visited the library every other week, picking up six to seven books each time. We also had a bookshelf full of cookbooks, trail guides, local history and general info. There were also a number of books on my kindle, and when desperation struck, and there was an internet connection, there were plenty more to download. When we left Massachusetts, we left with one milk full of reading material, our Milk Crate Library. As a librarian I'd mentally subdivided the library into three sections; cartography; containing maps of Michigan, Oregon and Washington; the reference section, containing Oregon bike routes, Canyonlands hikes,etc and general reading; both fiction and non-fiction. As our adventure has continued, we've had to discover sustainable ways to keep the material fresh, relevant and still keep it in a milk crate.

General Reading
Since there are no library cards on the road, and no internet connections in campgrounds it was only a week out and we were hungry for some new books. Desperation is a good motivator and it only took a few more days for us to secure a reliable means of obtaining books. Library book sales. Almost every public library takes book donations and has at least a book trucks worth of books for sale. Now, whenever we're in need of new reading material we locate the next largish library on our route and pull all our read materials out of the milk crate. We donate the 'old' books, and then buy 'new' ones from the book sale carts and shelves.

Cartography
This section has grown rapidly since leaving New England. While we generally picked up and disposed of state maps as we drove across the country resulting in no net gain there, we have also been buying Forest Service maps. These are detailed, often water resistant maps showing roads, campgrounds and hiking trails. Invaluable for truly exploring any backwoods area we find that we are unable to weed (a library term for removing non-usefully items) them from the collection. The map section of the milk crate now contains over 13 maps.

Reference
This section is also growing and while the local and state hiking books can be considered part of the rotating library we've found some books that are always useful, as any good reference book should be! For instance after spending hours hypothesizing about the identity of various birds and wildflowers, S.D. surprised me with two excellent guides as birthday presents. We also re-purchased "Mountain Weather" the one thing so far that we regretted selling back in Massachusetts. If we keep growing this and the cartography section at the current rate, we're going to need a second milk crate...and where will we get the space to keep it?