Ed Leeper takes some literature to the streets.

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Shelly, the autobiography of Shelly Winters, rides next to Bucky, A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller, by Hugh Kenner. Harry S. Truman, by Margaret Truman, rides next to a Signet paperback volume of Voltaire’s Candide. Doris Lessing’s Stories rides on a shelf close by The Last Juror, by John Grisham, Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace and The Witching Hour by Anne Rice.

Together they ride—with another 350 or so books, including a bunch of mathematical texts—on Ed Leeper’s old Toyota longbed pickup, as part of his current art project, “Liquid Books.” Painted on each of the pickup’s doors is a tribute. “THESE BOOKS ARE FROM THE ESTATE OF MOE TURNER,” an old friend of Leeper’s family and longtime professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, who passed away last year.

On each side of the truck’s bed Leeper has inscribed an invitation and a challenge: On the driver’s side it says: “I HAVE READ 318,692 PAGES. HOW MANY HAVE YOU READ?” On the passenger side it says: “THESE BOOKS ARE ALL FREE READ A FEW AND STRUT.”

In the past week or so, I have seen Ed’s longbed parked, festooned with its big “Liquid Books” signs, at the Safeway parking lot on Forest Hill, at Lake El Estero, and in downtown PG. Every time I’ve seen it, there was a small crowd surrounding Ed’s bookmobile.

I spent an hour last week visiting Ed and his rolling artwork at the MPC Farmers Market. Before getting into the cab to hang out with the artist, I spent some time perusing his stacks and visiting with his audience. I’d only been there a few minutes when I struck up a conversation with a man who held three books by the crime writer Ed McBain.

“He wrote The Birds, the Hitchcock movie,” the man explained. “Then, he had to make a living, so he wrote 30 or 40 of these detective books.” The man did not want to give me his name. (Was he ashamed his friends would not approve of his literary taste?) But he handed me a book: The Kiss. How generous, I thought. “There’s nothing better to read on an airplane,” the man said, before walking off.

Soon after I sat down in the passenger’s seat to talk to Ed, a woman approached with an armload. “Wow,” she said. “What a wonderful thing.”

“That’s the standard reaction,” Ed said to me. Then he called after her. “I’m an artist,” he said. “You have just participated in an artwork.”