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Joseph (left), a Street Books patron, checks out the trike\u2019s selection with Diana Rempe, the nonprofit\u2019s community outreach coordinator.<\/p>\n
At 11am each Wednesday, a Street\u00a0Books librarian pedals a trike<\/a> retrofitted as a mobile library<\/a> onto the sidewalk in front of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral at NW 19th and Davis. One morning this spring, Kindred by Octavia Butler, a self-help guide called The Grief Recovery Handbook, Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead, and a volume from a Star Trek serial sat on\u00a0a slim shelf inside the bike\u2019s open lid.\u00a0A Springsteen biography would later generate a few nostalgic conversations.<\/p>\n The sidewalk was alive with dogs, hugs, names, and stories picked up where they left off the week before. It was Richard Scarry\u2019s Busytown. People came and went from the free lunch inside the church, swapped gossip with the librarians, and checked out titles they\u2019d requested. It was a joyful vibe. And nearly everyone there was unhoused.<\/p>\n The trike couldn\u2019t meet every need. One person was asking around for Tylenol. Another requested wound care supplies to treat her brother\u2019s foot injury. Someone needed a tent. Literature, of course, wasn\u2019t much help. But books are what Street Books<\/a> does. The nonprofit mobile library hosts checkout sessions at a dozen places across the city each week, putting books in the hands of those who are houseless or otherwise living in precarity. The group does this not for some Pollyanna belief in the power of literature, but as a means of fighting for the humanity of its patrons.<\/p>\n \u201cStreet Books is about imagining a different kind of interaction between people who don\u2019t know one another, who are suffering in or experiencing the world in radically different ways,\u201d says community outreach coordinator Diana Rempe. While many aid organizations focus on providing and distributing humanitarian necessities, in its 15 years Street Books has found an opportunity for connection in lending books. The exchange forges ongoing mutual relationships that can extend past what\u2019s possible in a need-based dynamic, such as a health-care service or housing shelter; it\u2019s a social exercise, first and foremost. However small the gesture may seem, Rempe says returning with asked-for titles demonstrates that patrons\u2019 desires matter in a system where the needful must often take what they get.\u00a0<\/p>\n Though books are Street Books\u2019 primary mode of outreach, it also hands out basic supplies during library shifts.<\/p>\n The conversation mirrors how author Omar El Akkad<\/a> views books generally\u2014as points of reciprocal connection between author and audience. He learned of Street Books when he moved to Portland in the mid-2010s and has championed its work ever since, often giving readings at its events. \u201cIt\u2019s precisely because this isn\u2019t a mechanism of day-to-day survival that it matters so much,\u201d he says. Street Books surfaces a simple yet profound idea: that all people have rich inner lives, and an imperative to cultivate them, no matter their circumstances. \u201cI don\u2019t want to live in a community where certain groups of human beings are essentially expected to do nothing more than continue existing at the most basic level, and anything beyond that is considered too extravagant,\u201d El Akkad<\/a> says.<\/p>\n Still, Street Books doesn\u2019t eschew the basics. That day at the church, patrons walked away with LED flashlights, wet wipes, bandages, and reading glasses, all of which hung informally from the trike\u2019s handlebars in reusable shopping bags. The library also gave out 3,500 doses of the opioid overdose prevention medicine Naloxone last year. Codirector of programs and operations Josh Pollock says these harm-reduction efforts follow naturally from book lending. \u201cYou spend this time getting to know somebody,\u201d he says, \u201cand you want them to be healthy in this life.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere just aren\u2019t that many spaces where housed and unhoused neighbors in our city get together, you know, in a volitional way.\u201d\u2014Karen Russell, author and Street Books board member<\/p>\n Street Books is as casual in its\u00a0procedures as it is in its approachable\u00a0appearance. There are no plastic cards or IDs to check, no barcodes to scan, and no penalties for unreturned books. Librarians simply note first names and book titles by hand and encourage borrowers to return books if they can.<\/p>\n \u201cDo you have the latest Write Around Portland?\u201d one patron asked. \u201cI have some work in that one.\u201d No luck. But it went on the request sheet. Other titles leaving the cart spanned genres and eras: Walden,\u00a0a Stephen King bestseller, A Clockwork\u00a0Orange, Ed Yong\u2019s 2022 smash hit An\u00a0Immense World, a Vonnegut novel. One guy yahooed at the sight of a favorite childhood series. \u201cThis guy is a master of puns,\u201d he said with a smile. \u201cEvery other sentence is word play.\u201d<\/p>\n Karen Russell<\/a>, the author of Swamplandia! and a Pulitzer Prize finalist<\/a>, is\u00a0a member of Street Books\u2019 board and a regular Wednesday librarian. For her, the organization offers a glimpse of an alternate reality. \u201cThere just aren\u2019t that many spaces where housed and unhoused neighbors in our city get together,\u201d she says, \u201cyou know, in a volitional way.\u201d<\/p>\n Russell read from her latest novel, The Antidote<\/a>, at Street Books\u2019 15th anniversary It was Busytown again, a fantasy of something like equality made momentarily real. \u201cWe get to experience that kind of belonging, and what it could be like if we had a different world premised on different values,\u201d Russell says. It is a frustratingly ephemeral glimpse of real change, but once you have this picture, she says, \u201cthen it\u2019s not like an endlessly deferred dream.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Joseph (left), a Street Books patron, checks out the trike\u2019s selection with Diana Rempe, the nonprofit\u2019s community outreach…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":77313,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-77312","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77312\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/street-books-library-cart_michael-novak2_rdy8gb.jpg\"\/)
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party in the South Park Blocks this June, sharing the bill with a regular patron named Steve and singer-songwriter Laura Gibson<\/a>, who also volunteers with the group. Outside the art museum, patrons, supporters, and anyone else who showed up took in the performances and ate through enough pizza to serve 300, Rempe reports. They also consulted \u201cgrief stenographers,\u201d who logged partygoers\u2019 laments via typewriter then deposited them into a \u201cvolcano of sorrows\u201d concocted by local artist Larry Yes. There was also a \u201cbook divinator,\u201d which worked like a coin-operated fortune teller: Drop in a token and out pops the book one\u2019s soul needs.<\/p>\n