“I saw this, and it was just perfect and cute and available,” Nusz said about the truck she found on the eBay marketplace.
Her vision for a bookstore came when she inherited an old schoolhouse built a century ago. “I knew that we couldn’t afford to fill an entire store yet of books, so we had to do it in a more financially feasible way,” said Nusz.
That’s when the idea hit her like a truck to open a mobile bookstore using a mini-truck. “So we could have a small amount of books to carry around and that way we could kind of be a bookstore for the whole community and not just one spot in Louisville,” said Nusz.
The former teacher believes everyone deserves access to books, but the reality is accessibility to books is no fairytale. “Louisville has a lot of great independent bookstores, but they aren’t in every neighborhood, like in the Portland area and West End. There’s just not much at all,” Nusz said. “There’s all these beautiful areas and neighborhoods that have readers but neighborhoods that don’t have bookstores.”
Nusz fears those readers are missing out on a world of imagination. “Books let you have experiences you would never have and let you live lives that you’re never going to live, so you’re not just reading stories that you relate to or are about people like you. You get to have a peek into someone else’s life and what someone else experienced,” said Nusz.
Reading books is what helped Nusz discover her passion for writing and poetry.
“When I was in grade school I, unfortunately, had a teacher who did not encourage me to read and so I didn’t like books, and then in high school when I was turned on to more books that were appealing to me, I I just couldn’t stop,” said Nusz. “Just that experience of taking a book and being by yourself and being in a room and just entering a world and you don’t have to go anywhere, it’s just it’s magical and it’s empowering.”
The Foxing Book truck will sprinkle that magic across the city. “I hope to provide books to that person or those people who were like me and we’re just waiting to find a book that inspired them and led them to create their own stories or their own art,” said Nusz.
She plans to drive the truck to places like flea markets, coffee shops, and bars to give every neighborhood a chance to discover a love for literature.
Foxing Books celebrated the grand opening of the book truck on Sept. 28 at Shippingport Brewing Company.
You can follow Foxing Books on social media to find out where the truck will travel each day.
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