Lindberg has driven for the Worcester Public Library for 14 years. The library runs two vehicles, one of them known as Libby, on daily rounds through the city. Among the regulars at the nursing home is Mary Iram, who comes aboard to browse like any patron in any reading room. For people in care, a library that arrives at the door is often the only one they will visit.
Worcester is not alone. Newton and Watertown are about to launch their own services. Seven of the 15 libraries running them are in what Massachusetts calls Gateway Cities: mid-sized places where household income and university degrees both fall below the state average.
In Chicopee, the bookmobile is a converted van, the kind people rent for a house move, with yellow lettering on its side. Resident Sarah Phaneuf came across it by chance. Librarian Kate Ouimette and children's librarian Beth Oliveira staff its three weekly stops, among them the Doverbrook Condominium complex and the Cabot Manor Youth Center.
In Quincy, the Thomas Crane Public Library has gone smaller still. Its new book bike cost $10,000 and is painted with neon-coloured cranes. The director, Sara Slymon, reached for the comparison that anyone who has watched it arrive would make.
The welcome is much the same everywhere. Librarians say people honk their horns and wave when the vehicles turn the corner.
The reason for the growth is simple arithmetic. A bookmobile costs roughly $80,000 to run. A new library branch costs about $10 million to build. For a city with a thin budget, the choice is between building nothing and sending the books out to elderly residents in care homes, to children in neighbourhoods without a branch, to people who cannot walk far, and to families without a reliable car.
The idea is older than the car. In 1905, Mary Lemist Titcomb, a librarian in Washington County, Maryland, sent a horse-drawn wagon out to farms too far from town. The library janitor, Joshua Thomas, drove it. In 1910 a freight train struck the wagon at a railway crossing and destroyed it. No one was hurt, and two years later the library replaced it with a motorised one.
Nationally, the vehicles have been disappearing for decades. Their number peaked at 1,125 in 1991 and had fallen to 671 by 2019. Massachusetts is going the other way, one stop at a time.
At Saint Francis, the lift rises again with another reader aboard.
"It's like an ice cream truck, but with books!"