Latanya DeVaughn loves books. Her love of books can be traced back to her childhood, from watching her grandmother read to neighbors who couldn’t, and from scouring yard sales for used books with her aunt. Years later, that love manifested in the mobile bookstore, Bronx Bound Books.

 

Back in 2019, DeVaughn decided to chase her lifelong dream of owning a bookstore. She said prior to that she had spent years waiting for the right time, working other jobs that had left her feeling unfulfilled. As she waited, rent prices in the Bronx continued to rise, further discouraging DeVaughn from her dream.

 

When she finally decided to go for it, rent prices for a brick-and-mortar location were high, so she decided to go with a pop-up bookstore. She traveled around the Bronx, setting up her book display. However, she said transporting and loading and unloading the books became a burden. That’s when her friend showed her the social media page for a mobile book truck in Delaware.

 

“I started following that mobile book truck on my social media, then I started seeing other book mobiles and it inspired me to pursue it because I knew now that there was a different way to owning a bookstore,” said DeVaughn. She began raising money and awareness for her mobile book library with the goal in mind of buying and renovating a bus. In November 2020, she did just that and bought a bus in with her savings and won a $20,000 grant from the Ford Foundation’s Local Initiatives Support Corp (LISC) to renovate it.

 

According to DeVaughn, her first year as a traveling bookstore was successful. She said she built up partnerships with various organizations, including a deal with Book Fairy on Long Island to give away free books, and got feedback from the community about what they wanted to see. Before she got the bus, DeVaughn said her business relied on access to outdoor space.

 

“So I was partnering with a parks’ group, doing, you know, anything and everything I could to just get in front of the community to know what they wanted in a bookstore,” she said. But amidst her early success, COVID-19 struck New York City in the spring of 2020, messing
up her plans.

 

“2020, COVID happened and everything was shut down, but I decided to fight through the feeling of wanting to give up, and I did story times online, to be able to stay in touch with those people that wanted to support us,” DeVaughn said. After the first story time Bronx Bound Books hosted, DeVaughn said about 60 people emailed her asking to be the next story time leader. She said they continued the virtual event for weeks, explaining that it allowed them to continue their mission of bringing books and literacy to the public.

 

DeVaughn said people from all over the world joined the virtual story times, including Puerto Rican author, Esmerelda Santiago, who wrote the book “When I was Puerto Rican.” She said Santiago shared her story of becoming an author and why it was important to keep reading.
“She was really great and she was supposed to only give us 30 minutes of her time but she gave us about an hour and a half and she gave us information about why it was important to buy books written by people of color, diverse books in general,” said DeVaughn.

 

After purchasing her bus and waiting months for renovations to be completed, DeVaughn finally decided to soft launch her bus out the first weekend of September 2021. With all the waiting and delays though the spring and summer of 2021, she said she felt like she wasn’t being honest with the people invested in Bronx Bound books.

 

“But I didn’t want to wait for it to be perfect,” DeVaughn said. “Like right now, we’re still raising money to paint the outside, and to do some exterior work because it needs a little bit of bodywork, but inside is beautiful. I want people to get to see that the inside is beautiful so they’ll help us make the outside just as beautiful.”

DeVaughn said she has had some interest from artists to do artwork on the outside. At the time of her interview, she was still raising money to finish the bus but as of February 2022, she not only met her GoFundMe goal of $2500, but has raised an additional almost $7,000.
“I felt like I’m just bringing the community with me along on the journey of getting it on the road and to people being curious and very, very invested in this project,” she said. “So, I’m really happy that they get to see it I don’t want to hide or wait.”

 

Books and reading have always been a huge part of DeVaughn’s life. She was raised by her grandmother, an educator in The Bronx who would read leases, prescriptions, and more to neighbors who could not. “Seeing that every so often, very often, I knew that reading was important so, I would read anything I could get my hands on,” she said.

 

As a child, she said her aunt picked her up on weekends and took her to The Strand bookstore in Manhattan and garage sales in New Jersey to buy used books. “I’ve always loved to read. My children love to read. I’m a mom, I have three children, my four year old gives me tips on how to sell books,” she said. “Reading and books have been a very, very big thing, and I grew up around so many books.”

 

DeVaughn said the support from the community has been great, from friends bringing her food and water, to books donation. She said The Rambling House restaurant in Woodlawn organized a book drive for her and she didn’t even know about it until after the fact. “People show up for me in ways that I can’t even describe, and it always surprises me how they show up,” she said.

 

While Bronx Bound Books is mainly run by DeVaughn, she said she also has volunteers who drive, pick up book donations, and help sell or sort books. She said her support network allows her to focus on the business. “I do have a very strong network of friends and people that I’ve met along the way that show up in ways that I can’t even imagine, like the eyes and ears,” she said.

She also has strong ties to the surrounding community, partnering with local organizations to promote literacy and reading in The Bronx. Bronx Bound Books used to visit the Bronx Botanical Garden on Wednesdays and the Riverdale farmers market on Sundays. DeVaughn said she tries to put out a calendar every month to let people know where they can find their set-up.

 

Around the holidays, DeVaughn partnered with the Jerome Gun Hill Business Improvement District (BID) and Mosholu Preservation Corporation (MPC), who rented the bus for three days and gave away free books to the community. DeVaughn said she partnered with the BID to make books accessible to the community. While this was the first time Bronx Bound Books partnered with the BID, other organizations have rented the bus and given books away for free.

 

Nathalia Guendel Bueno, community and economic development associate for Mosholu Preservation Corporation (MPC), said they wanted to partner with Bronx Bound Books, the thinking being that a book was worth more than a cheap toy. “Instead of giving toys away that will literally go to the trash in like the next two months, might as well give something with quality and something that will like you know, help the community,” said Guendel Bueno.

 

Daniela Beasley, manager of small business support with MPC, said the turnout for the partnered event was great, citing their parking spot at a busy intersection. Guendel Bueno agreed, saying the turnout was even better than expected. DeVaughn said she met a woman at the event who got extremely excited when she picked out a “Lord of The Rings” book. “She said, ‘I lost this book. I’m not going to tell you how I lost it and I was in the middle of it.’ [The woman] then started crying. I was like, I gotta leave; this is so overwhelming.” DeVaughn said books give her life.

 

She went on to say that she would love to partner with schools and do more programming around parents engaging with their children and literacy. She said she would love to partner with senior centers or elderly homes and get youth to read to the residents and she would also be interested in doing writing workshops or listening to the residents tell stories to young people.

 

She said her desire to work with the elderly community comes from regrets she has about not hearing all of her grandmother’s stories before she passed. She said she remembers bits and pieces of her grandmother’s journey and finds it important to pass those stories down to her children.

 

“I think the aging community is very important to our future, because we always have to remember where we came from and, you know, once they’re no longer around, those stories aren’t around either, so I wish I spoke more to my grandmother and documented the things that she would tell me,” she said.

DeVaughn said she also enjoys working with local artists and small businesses to sell their merchandise and wants to expand that initiative in the future. She said she wants to let the community know about all the creative business owners around. She emphasized that Bronx Bound Books is a new and used book store, meaning they have “pay as you wish” days for used books so people who might not be able to afford regularly priced books have the option to come pick something out.

 

“When you have that model, it’s okay if a kid comes to you and doesn’t have enough, or doesn’t have money at all,” she said. “If I could give all the books away for free, I would, but I’m running a business. But letting go of a few books so someone could have…. it’s more important for them to have the book.”