I spent the better part of this morning helping the Friends of the Fitchburg Library prepare for one of their triannual book sales. Many thousands of books, CDs, DVDs and other items had to be transferred from the storage bankers boxes to plastic tabletop trays. Fortunately the books had already been sorted into categories, so it was just a matter of unboxing and rearranging them.
These sales bring in thousands of dollars to the library for use in outreach programs, children's programs, and staff development. When the doors open tomorrow, the first ones through will be local book dealers who will zoom around with their portable barcode readers to find bargains. The volunteers price books cheaply and the sheer volume precludes individual pricing. They do try to assess old books more carefully; one year someone donated a copy of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, with the author's name misprinted as "H.S. Wells" - a mark of a rare first edition [example at right]. It had some damaged pages, but still brought in $500 in a private sale.One noticeable trend in recent years has been an increasing flood of DVDs donated to the library - probably reflecting the public's shifting preference toward streaming rather than buying physical copies.
I encourage all readers to patronize your local library, which likely has extensive resources (local history, geneaology, etc) and programs (child literacy, adult continuing education) that you may be unaware of. If you have some spare time and a love of books, your library probably has a volunteer group that would welcome you with open arms. These are nice people, and working with them can provide a nice variation from whatever hassles you face in daily life.
And remember;
ReplyDeleteFriends help you move.
REAL friends help you move books. ;)
Amen rocky!! I love my library's book sales; I always find at least 1 treasure, and usually more!
ReplyDeleteI went to a library book sale in St. Louis with my wife and mother-in-law once, years ago. They got a lot of books. We had a small car. I had to take a bus home. True story.
ReplyDeletemy library gave up on their annual and then semi-annual book sales. it turned out that those were just not making enough money for the library.
ReplyDeletethey now have a 'book nook', a small room with book shelves, where donated books, dvds, cds, vhs tapes, etc. are sold all year long. people make donations daily, from single books to boxes full. those are picked over by volunteers as to what can be sold in the 'book nook', what can be added to the library circulation collection to replace worn out circulating books or as new additions, what can be thrown out (moldy, dirty, in poor shape), and what will not sell. in addition, the volunteers tag each item with a colored dot, and it stays on the shelves for about a month. the 'what will not sell' and the 'still on the shelf after a month' items are boxed and donated to the salvation army to resell in their stores. the library now makes way much more money with the 'book nook' than with the annual sales - like 3x or 4x more. plus, no worries about storing thousands of books for a year, lugging them out of storage, getting rid of boxes of leftovers after the sale, etc.
while the annual book sale is fun, you really should do it all year long.
I-)
We have one of those too -
Deletehttps://friendsoffitchburglibrary.com/book_sales
- but small. We have enough space and volunteers to set up and manage the triannual sales. Our unsolds do go to other charities - they are not pulped. But we no longer accept paperbacks or VHS tapes (nor does Goodwill, for that matter).
> We have one of those too -
Deletethe 'book nook' has maybe 5x the shelving as in that photo, each unit being five feet tall. it also much better prices - dvds are 50 cents, cds are 50 cents, hardbound books are a dollar, soft cover are 50 cents.
I-)