Books By the Ton

 

Every fall, I help in a local fundraiser for our public library where we take donated used books in good condition and sell them cheaply back to the public with all the funds being given to the library to purchase more books. Last year, we came close to raising $30,000, our best year ever. 

Although the sale lasts only three short days in the fall, work to prepare for it began a month earlier. Shopping carts are set up at the drop off location for people to put their donated books into. Myself and an army of volunteers wheel those carts upstairs to a cavernous storage room where we unpack them onto sorting tables and then one by one, classify them into one of about two dozen genres on more tables. Once they have been sorted, they are boxed up and put in stacks by genre until moving day. On moving day, myself and a couple other able bodied people, use large wheeled dollies to haul all those boxes of books, down to a large gymnasium sized room below where the actual sale is held. I think last year we moved over 900 boxes full of books which at 40 pounds each, comes out to around 18 tons of books! It usually takes me a week to recover from moving day!

Sorting before the sale however is a bit easier and I sometimes enjoy it. I like to judge a reader by the box of books they donated. I also find humor in what books people have bought or obtained at some point in their lives. We often shout out titles to each other as we are sorting to get a laugh and lighten the work. We are very judgmental at times. One of the perks of the job of sorting, is we are allowed to keep a book or three that we come across as "payment" for our donated labor. Last year I culled out a small box of books that I'm still not completely through so this year I haven't brought home any... well except for the one book above.

I read Johnny Tremain in sixth grade and so loved the book. The class we read it in of course assigned only a few pages every day but me being a book worm, read it entirely the first evening I had it home. I quickly learned though that if I were going to do good on the daily quizzes our teacher gave to "encourage" reading among my classmates, I would have to still reread the assigned section, or at least skim through it, to remind myself what was going on at that point. Over the years, I have often remembered that book so I guess it could be said it made a memorable impression on me. It is also one that very few people I have ever mentioned it too has heard it's name. So when it showed up in front of me in a pile of books on the sorting table, I had to set it aside. I haven't yet reread it but I plan to this winter sometime. Being a children's book, it shouldn't take me much time but I'm hoping it does take me down memory lane again. 

Then next fall, I'll likely take it back to one of our sorting days and it will go into a box of like books slated for another book sale in a few weeks.