Booksale Leftovers

Time, once again, for the annual library book sale.  We hold this book sale to make money for the library from discarded and donated books.  All year long the librarians track their collections for books that are showing wear and for books that are not being checked out.  Since we are such a small library, we do not have room on the shelf for books that are seldom used. Sometimes it really hurts having to remove a favorite book from our collection because it has aged and people have forgotten about it.  

All the books that are removed from the collection have to be shelved in the closet and that closet can get very full. With all the different sizes of books it is almost impossible to find a really good stacking technique so that they all fit on the shelf right. It looks that there could be a book avalanche in there at any time.

This week we will have to take all of those books out of the closet and set them up in our meeting rooms for the book sale.  It is a labor intensive job getting those books out of the closet - many trips to and fro with loaded, heavy carts or boxes full of books and magazines.  This year we have the youth city council helping us out with that hard part.  Other volunteers come and help us put the books out on the tables in some sort of organization and this usually takes us four to five hours. 

Our book sale runs 3 weeks this year and we always hope to sell all the books by Peach Days when we are giving the books away for $1 a bag.  Even then, some books will lay abandoned and unloved - mostly the non-fiction - very seldom a children's book.  So now comes the hard part, finding someone who wants those books that are still left.   It has become harder and harder every year to find an organization who wants our leftover books.  It is discouraging to find that all these groups who say they want your books and that they will donate them to needy children or 3rd world countries, do not want to come and get them.  I guess that is the key - they want them if we take them but they won't come and get them.  I was very, very happy today to contact the Ogden Rescue mission and find that they will still come and pick up books.  I hope, in this new age of the e-book, that someone will still want our discarded books. It is harder and harder to give them away.

Susan
Friends of the Library