Bring the books to the people

Loom and Lore, a first-of-its-kind mobile bookshop serving Green Bay and Northeast Wisconsin, celebrated its grand opening this August as a joint venture between longtime friends turned business partners Erin Sherwood and Sydney Vassal.

“My business partner Sydney Vassal and I have known each other since we were in sixth grade and we’ve kind of always known that we’ve had a complementary set of skills,” Sherwood said. “I’m a project manager by day and she does marketing by day. We’ve kind of thrown around several business ideas over the years, just thinking that we would be good business partners.”

While they knew they would make good business partners, Sherwood said it wasn’t until this spring that they felt inspired to take the leap.

“I’m a big reader,” Sherwood said. “I love reading romance books and fantasy books and that kind of thing and we stumbled on the idea online of different people buying school buses and converting them into mobile bookstores and we thought that was so cool. We were joking about it a bit and doing a little bit of research and then we were outlining a business plan and eventually it came to a point where we were like, ‘It’s time to put our money where our mouth is and buy a bus.’ That was in May of this year, so in just over three months time, we purchased a bus and completely retrofitted it into a mobile bookstore. It was kind of a joke at the beginning and then here we are, we’ve really done it.”

“We were inspired by bookmobiles of the early 1900s,” Sherwood said. “Mary Lemist Titcomb started the first bookmobile and her idea was to bring the books to the man, don’t wait for the man to come to the books. That’s kind of the idea — to bring books with us and maybe open the eyes of the community to something that maybe they’ve never seen before or something they’ve never thought they would pick up to read.”

And Sherwood and Vassal are well on their way to achieving that goal with a full slate of events already scheduled for this fall.

“We’re going to be traveling around to different local businesses like breweries, coffee shops, vendor events, that kind of thing, and what we’re going to be offering is a variety of romance books, fantasy, thriller and a little sprinkle of some nonfiction and some historical fiction, along with handmade goods and indie-made products from pretty much all women-owned businesses that we’re working with,” Sherwood said.

Book lovers can find all of Loom and Lore’s upcoming events on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and loomlore.square.site.