The Bookmobile Taxi Of Tehran

WORDS Posted: August 15, 2014 - via Arts Journal

Mehdi Yazdany and Sarvenaz Heraner are no ordinary cabbies: they offer “a mobile reading room and taxi service, complete with chauffeur-librarian.” The cab has more than 40 titles, “from Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis to Charles Bukowski’s Pulp. There are also works by Iranian standouts such as Nader Ebrahimi, Zoya Pirzad and Sohrab Sepehri. … When you pay the fare, you can buy a book.”

Read the story at The Wall Street Journal Published: 08.15.14

And from Shelf Awareness:

Cool Idea of the Day: Taxi/Bookstore

The Wall Street Journal has a long profile of the Iranian husband-and-wife team Mehdi Yazdany and Sarvenaz Heraner, whose wonderful creation is "a mobile reading room and taxi service, complete with chauffeur-librarian." They call the mobile bookstore "Ketabraneh," which translates as Books on Wheels.

For the past five years, the pair, who met working in a bookstore, have driven around Tehran like any other taxi, but their cab has "more than 40 titles, 130 volumes in all [that] are stacked behind the back, shelved on racks over the passenger window, cluttering the dashboard, crammed into side pockets and stuffed in the trunk. When you pay the fare, you can buy a book."

Titles are a mix of translated international bestsellers and Iranian classics and include Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Charles Bukowski's Pulp and works by Iranians such as Nader Ebrahimi, Zoya Pirzad and Sohrab Sepehri. They sell 30 books a day on average, and sometimes give books for free to poor riders.

They also play a collection of "Eastern and Western classical music designed to create a peaceful mood and compete with Tehran's noisy traffic."
The couple's next project is opening a coffeeshop/bookstore/reading room.