It was one for the books: this year’s book sale brought in a record-breaking $17,600, $9,000 of which was made in just two hours on Friday night. One shopper spent $375 for her bookstore, The Raven, in Northampton. All of the proceeds from this three-day sale will be used to enrich the library by supporting programming, museum passes, and more.
The logistics of putting together such an enormous sale are daunting. We are indebted to Sacred Heart Church for generously allowing us to use Father Ted Hall for 2½ weeks. We cannot imagine a better space for a book sale.
This sale could not have happened without the strong arms of our town’s public works crew. Led by Chris Matejek, they moved over 1,000 boxes of books from our storage area to Father Ted Hall, and then returned after the sale to help us clear out the leftovers and move 70 heavy tables. They were fantastic.
A dedicated core of volunteers, joined by many others, helped with the set-up, take-down, and actual running of the sale. During the sale, cashiers were hard at work checking out customers while other volunteers straightened the books on the tables.
On October 7, we will resume our monthly Saturday morning book collections at the library. Those donations will be sorted and stored in the space generously provided to us by Second Baptist Church. This sale truly is a community effort.
And yet…. Despite the outpouring of support and help on “book-moving day,” when the books were moved to Father Ted Hall, we found ourselves seriously short-handed when the clean-up began on the Monday after the sale. That Tuesday, the day on which we had promised to be out of the building, we had only a small crew of volunteers, all of us in our late 70s and early 80s. The town crew kindly bailed us out by lifting all of those heavy tables and moving leftover books back to our storage area, but we cannot expect them to do this in the future. If this sale is to continue, we will need a crew of strong volunteers on the Monday and Tuesday after the sale to lift tables, carry boxes, and clean.