Books Across Kentucky

President Harry Schacter of the Kaufman-Straus department store in Louisville was only an observer at the annual meeting of the Friends of Kentucky Libraries. But the facts he heard from the Friends disturbed him. In library service, he learned, no state except North Dakota ranks lower than Kentucky: 80% of its rural population gets no such service at all. By the time the meeting was over, Harry Schacter had an idea.

By last week Schacter's idea had mushroomed into the most high-pressured culture drive Kentucky had ever seen. Alben Barkley was in on it, and so were Happy Chandler, Senators Earle Clements and John Sherman Cooper, Novelists A. B. Guthrie and Robert Penn Warren. Chairmaned by Mrs. Barry Bingham, the energetic wife of the editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, the campaign was out to put Parnassus on wheels, get no bookmobiles circulating through the state. This week, in Nelson County, the first one was about to go into operation.

To drum up donations, Mrs. Bingham's workers have toured 64 of the state's 120 counties, making speeches, visiting local notables, persuading newspapers to give the campaign special publicity. They have persuaded 36 organizations from the C.I.O. and the United Daughters of the Confederacy to the Home-owned Grocers' Association to back them. Already they have received promises of bookmobiles from every sort of group from a truck drivers' local to the Honorable order of Kentucky Colonels. According to the project's heads, a donor can offer a whole bookmobile ($3,000) or just some of its parts--a flywheel for $9, a gas tank for $17.50, or even a connecting rod for 12-c-. So far, a total of 20 bookmobiles has been promised.

This fall some communities in the state will have their own March of Books, with citizens going from door to door to ask for contributions. Kentucky theaters will put on special matinees, charge two book as the price of admission. Four Kentucky colleges are talking of special six-week courses for new driver-librarians. By next spring, Mrs. Bingham expects that Kentucky will at last have as good a library service as any state in the Union. After all. says she, "good books, next to good parents, are singly the most powerful educative force in the world."

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