Friends of the Library Book Sale Bargains

Calling all local lurkers...today and Monday are your big chance to mop up massive bargains on new, recent, and antique books at the Friends of the Gate City Library book sale in Gate City, Virginia.

That would be on Jackson Street...sorry, I'm typing this directly into the'Net and I forget the street number...in the Cornerstone Books building, soon to be Cornerstone Communications (we hope), between Brenda's and the bank.

I've been waiting to post something about this sale until some photos that focussed on bargain books in the window arrived in the e-mail. The photos didn't arrive. The bargain books were sold. Meanwhile a zealous new Friend of the Library has been stocking local for-profit stores, including the future Cornerstone Communications, with literally truckloads of bargain books...and then...oh, drat and blast, the political is personal, and politics raises its head everywhere.

I don't know how many of the older Friends of the Library who planned the price schedule for this summer's book sale actually vote Old Right. I do know the newer, younger Friend who expressed disillusionment with a system most Friends accepted as fair is a Democrat, has lived in Europe, and votes Old Left.

While small-town types buzz about the personality clash, and whether a Virginia gentleman should ever make that kind of remarks to Virginia ladies and gentlemen of the older generation, I'd like to call attention to the fact that the price scheduling that works for Friends of Libraries across the United States is a free-market, libertarian, Old Right system.

At some Friends book sales, like the famous Arlington (Virginia) biannual sale-and-extreme-sports-event where booksellers race to fill their trunks without actually injuring one another, the price scheduling is fast and brutal. Traditionally the Arlington book sale takes place during two weekends a year. The racing is most furious on Thursday, when people actually pay to enter the shopping competition and buy books for something close to the price for which collectible books will be resold on Amazon and in upscale stores. On Friday books are available to the public at these prices. On Saturday the prices drop, and on Sunday you can fill any bag you can haul out for a fixed price before the culls are recycled.

In small towns, like Gate City, book sales tend to be more leisurely. Books were sold for their market value in May, discounted in June, and sold for five dollars a bag in July.

As July ends, and now that Cornerstone Communications has officially purchased enough secondhand books for the amount of space we need to fill with'em, I invite book lovers to go in and fill your bags. You will be able to cram a few titles you may have seen discussed here as Books You Can Buy From Me into a traditional paper grocery bag, if you so choose, because I didn't buy duplicates. There are still literally truckloads (4x4s, if not eighteen-wheelers) of good nonfiction books left on the shelves. Lots of Christian books, some science, some history, some good-quality literary fiction, some kiddie books, and some Friends have even brought in last-minute bargains on the romance and western novels some clever junk-book dealers tried to mop up weeks ago.

Is this fair? Have people who bought the books we really wanted to read, for ourselves, been cheated by paying the market price per book, rather than five dollars a bag in July or a penny a pound before the culls go for recycling on Tuesday? I don't feel cheated.

All books are not created equal. The disappointed Democrat knows this; he personally bought textbooks that may still be in use on some campuses, first editions, and hot-selling fiction, and ignored textbooks that now have only souvenir value and titles that appeal only to specialists, while choosing stock for Cornerstone Communications, Ivy Cottage, and various other stores. The books he passed by are not as valuable as the ones he bought. That is why they're now available at a lower price. That's why, because we can store only so many books, some excellent but not particularly rare bargains still need you to rescue them from recycling.

I've happily paid two dollars for a special book, then fifty cents or twenty-five cents each for books that were a little less special. I've deliberately passed over some books that I think were well worth buying on the bag sale in order to let people who've not yet read them discover them for themselves. I think some books, merely because I've already read them and because they're not in mint condition, can wait for someone else to buy them or for me to buy them just before they're trucked off for recycling. And, yes, I will be steering latecomers to those books during what's left of the sale.

Some cult authors I left on the shelves yesterday, for youall to find today and Monday, include Jean Plaidy, Elizabeth Cadell, Frank Peretti, Pat Boone, Jane Aiken Hodges, Marilyn Sachs, Jerry Jenkins (as co-author with people other than Tim LaHaye), Dale Evans Rogers, Hal Borland, and Harry Zim, and those are just some that float into my memory as authors of the duplicates of books I already have. There is also a good selection of classics that will appear on high school and college reading lists--Chaucer, Shakespeare, various translations from Greek and Latin, collections of medieval and early modern English, Burns, Thackeray, Faulkner...

Why should you pay five dollars a bag instead of waiting for the final race with the recyclers? Because this is a Friends of the Library book sale. Proceeds go to subsidize children's programs, and whatever else adults trying to use the library's computer center may think about those programs, they certainly do fill a need. They are wildly popular.

And they're funded by local people who want good-quality, family-friendly, age-appropriate entertainment to be available for children of full-time mothers who need a free weekly shopping-and-errands break. None of the retirees and teenagers who take in the money is being paid for keeping this sale open all summer. Some of them actually bought, read, and donated some of the books in the store.

I don't know to what extent anybody actually cares, but yes, you may have seen me, and you may have seen some of Oliver's human family, sitting side by side and talking to the retiree who was managing the book sale, yesterday afternoon...despite the rift between that family (and their store) and me (and my family and our store). If anybody out there does think of small-town storekeepers as role models for anything, God help them, I hope that's given somebody the idea. Whatever rifts and tiffs and differences may exist between people in Scott County, I hope we can all agree that there needs to be a safe source of free, occasional "respite care" for young children of busy parents.

Grab your bargains, Gentle Readers. All's fair. You're not competing with Cornerstone Communications, with Ivy Cottage, or with whatever other stores may stock books that have previously been purchased from the Friends of the Library. You are helping us. You can buy books from us, or even sell them back to us, later, and still help the younger people of Scott County now.