Bookmobile, meet "Biblioburro"

In the United States we have vans and buses to offer books to people without access to them. A not-significant swathe of rural Colombia, near the Northern town of La Gloria, depends on one man, two donkeys, and the man's collection of some 4,800 books. (Not all of which go on the road at once, of course.)

Luis Soriano, a primary-school teacher, has been undertaking his quixotic effort to bring reading material -- and literacy -- to the rural poor for a decade, according to the New York Times's Simon Romero. Bandits plague the area, and Soriano has not been immune to their threats: Two years ago, robbers ambushed him and tied him to a tree. Realizing he had no money, they contented themselves with a copy of "Brida," a novel by the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho -- a perennial favorite author in these parts. The hard men were quite taken by the "story of an Irish girl and her search for knowledge," as Romero summarizes the book. Chalk it up as yet another victory for Soriano, however indirect.

Via the Harvard University Press Blog, which gushes, "All hail Biblioburro"