Book Sale. Or Sail.
Another Friends of the Library Book Sale has come and gone, the first Heather and I have coordinated on our own. As a fundraising professional, this event is a lot of work for little financial return. As a library trustee, I see lots of room for improvement. As a community member, I have to wonder about the fate of paper books, and about the readers/book consumers in this town. As a fan of books in general, it was rather sobering and depressing to have to dispose of so many books.
A year's worth of donated books and library discards was stored at the nearby Crouton Factory building; a small, utilitarian building that was once a pig processing plant (an alliterative name that many people who lived in town during the PPP era call it, whereas people -- like me -- who knew it as a crouton factory refer to it as such). Nine people moved 12 truck/carloads of books from the CF/PPP to our town hall. We sorted the books for five hours on July 3, then sold the books before and after our July 4th parade. We had a Free Books morning the day after the parade, then had three car/truckloads of books left to recycle. All for less than $2,000 in profits, which is less than last year.
These are the things I am left mulling over, post sale:
- How do we get folks to stop donating crap (i.e., old, crummy, dusty, outdated, useless books) that we end up having to recycle? We re-wrote the donation policy, but it didn't seem to make a difference. No one wants 20-year-old library discards, nor old coffee table books, nor worn mass market paperbacks.
- What do we do about the people who are moving or disposing of estates who donate such volumes (no pun intended) of elderly books? We had some truly old books, things with dates from the late 1800's. No one at a July 4th book sale is going to want that! Yet book antiquarians might be interested.
- Even though we had a No Media policy, people still donated VHS tapes, DVD's, and books on tape. We didn't even try to charge money for them -- we gave them away. And still had two big boxes we had to pay to discard at the recycling center.\
- What else can we do to reduce the leftover books? I suppose we could store the potentially sellable for another year. We post that all books are free at the end of the sale on Freecycle, Front Porch Forum and spread the word to other book sales. We give donors info about other donation options, such as Paperbackbookswap.com and Goodwill. I could contact the high school and try to find a student who is doing their Grad Challenge project who might want to take on sending books to a special program. We could alert all the used bookstores about our post-sale free day. We could reach out to the book dealers who usually come in and clear out our saleable items.
- We do our best to sort fiction from non-fiction, children's books from young adult books, but it's a huge task. We have some regular volunteers who feel strongly about organizing certain writers together in the adult fiction, but we need people who know (and read) romance, mystery, thrillers, etc. to make sure the right books are in the right place. Picture books are easy enough to identify, but when does a chapter book become a YA book?