ShareThisBy PETER RICE
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Not many jobs open to high-school-age kids could be considered even remotely literary, but 17-year-old Claudia Tarin holds one of the few.
Every Sunday evening and Wednesday afternoon, Tarin visits most of the city's 140 or so transit buses and stocks them with five or six children's books.
The job description draws some interesting reactions from friends.
"They get surprised. They wouldn't think that I would work with books or that books would even be in buses," she said.
The program that brings American commuters and American letters together celebrated its first anniversary. Called Discover a Book, the program's goal is to channel donated books to little racks on city buses.
From there, the goal is to get them into the hands of children, promoting literacy, and hopefully, if the book is engaging enough, the sanity of parents.
Transit systems in Anchorage, Alaska and Rochester, N.Y. maintain similar programs.
Transit spokesman James Fought showed off one of the book caches recently, a windowless room about as big as a mid-sized office crammed to the gills with boxes of books. Even the most dexterous bodies would have trouble taking three steps inside.
"It's just a closet with books, but it gives you an idea of how many books we have," he said.
The program has collected 75,000 items so far, about 50,000 of which actually qualify as children's books.
Poking through the storage room confirms that trend. There's "Robinson Crusoe," "The Adventures of Tin Tin," "Charlotte's Web" and the Reading Rainbow book "Backyard Insects." But then there's an October 1966 copy of Antiques Magazine and "Roadside History of New Mexico."
"We probably wouldn't put that on the bus," Faught said.
Once items get on the bus, tracking them becomes difficult. One sign of success is obvious: The books fly off the racks, despite a large red stamp encouraging just the opposite.
"We like for people to put them back," Faught said. Reality intervenes sometimes, and "we have a lot of books that we can replace them with."
