(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - I'm Emory Harkins and I'm one of the owners of Twenty Stories.

- And I'm Alexa Trembly, and I'm also one of the owners of Twenty Stories.

We started as a bookmobile out in Los Angeles.

We run out of a 1987 Chevy van.

Springtime through the end of summer is like when we call it van season.

We're doing our first wedding this year, which is really fun.

- We do get a lot of dads who come up to the bookmobile and they're like, what year is this thing?

Because it's an old Chevy van.

They're like, hey, how many cylinders you got on that thing?

- [Interviewer] Have you guys always been bookish?

- I mean I remember getting in trouble in school, I'd be reading books in math class and I would walk down to Kennedy Plaza to catch the bus from high school and I'd read all the way there.

- I read a lot of detective books growing up and I then would do my own detective work based off of the books.

- [Interviewer] What sort of mysteries did you solve?

- So many, so many family mysteries.

Like go around and be like dad's watching the History Channel again.

It felt like the big stuff then, felt like the big time.

Put a bookmark in there for you.

- And we took a vacation to Portugal and while we were there we saw a bookmobile on the street that sold translated literature.

- There's a really rich history of bookmobiles.

A lot of times bookmobiles went to what we like to call book deserts.

- [Announcer] To help get books into the hands of children who have no books of their own.

- A lot of times they were operating through the library system.

They would go to these destinations so people had access.

It's been fun to have our iteration of what that could look like.

Just being able to stumble upon us kind of hearkens back to that older time.

- I think I'm gonna get this.

- You're gonna go with that one?

Cool.

And then it slowly grew into also a brick and mortar space which is where we are now.

- This is a really fun short story collection.

And look at that beautiful cover, right?

- Why it's called Twenty Stories, the Bookmobile only had so much space and we wanted everything to be intentional.

It's 12 fiction, four poetry, four nonfiction.

Always more books to read, so it's hard to keep up.

And we've had people come back who haven't been reading for like 10 years and they're like, I'm a reader now.

And they start regularly reading books again.

And that's probably probably just one of the most fulfilling parts of our job.

Thanks for coming in.

Have a good one.

(gentle music)