Last weekend, our local library held its annual ebook sale. This occasion is constantly a madhouse. The library spends the whole week gathering donated books and recordings from citizens, and sorting them into boxes in a lower back room. Then on Saturday morning, even before the library is officially open, they release a returned door and permit in 1/2 the population of Highland Park, as it generally seems on the time, to paw via the heaps of volumes which can be roughly grouped into classes on tables in that small returned room...And in bins beneath the ones tables...And on extra tables lining the once more hallway...And spilling out onto the back lawn.
We go to this sale every twelve months, and each 12 months I forget until I get there surely what a zoo it is. The outdoor place isn't too terrible; no matter the truth that the books are simply loosely (and no longer normally appropriately) grouped into containers specified in rows on the floor, there's normally sufficient room for a couple of character at a time to look at every row. But the crowd grows a good deal denser once you skip thru the door, and denser though whilst you push your way into the little again room. The tables are so tightly packed collectively that there may be just enough room for one person to squeeze among them, and no room the least bit for a 2nd individual to slip past on the same time as the number one is browsing the books. This method that if I want to have a look at the contents of a specific table, I frequently should look ahead to a person else to get out of the manner first?And even after I benefit get admission to, I do not virtually feel free to take my time browsing, know-how that I is probably blocking off someone else's manner to the books.
The upshot of that is that, even though we're surrounded through thousands of temptingly reasonably-priced books, we typically come to be actually searching for only a few. Personally, I not even try to look at each amount it's miles on provide. Outdoors, I might also take some time to as a minimum glance at each call within the boxes of reasonably-priced sci-fi and romance paperbacks, but as soon as I get internal, I deal with pushing my way through to the few sections that in particular hobby me?Gardening, games, economics?And thumbing thru the volumes there as speedy as feasible to look if there may be a few element nicely worth a extra careful look. If I do discover some thing of hobby, I take just a few seconds to take a look at the quilt blurb and maybe flip via the pages in advance than you make a decision and both which include it to my stack or placing it lower back. As I make my way thru the room, I'll give a cursory look to the rows of novels organized at the tables, and maybe even pick out up a name that jumps out at me, however I do not make the effort to read every name?And I do not even try to study the ones at the ground. This 12 months, after about half of an hour of preventing our way thru the crowd, we ended up purchasing for just four books:
- a hardcover collection of mystery stories from the '70s
- an Inspector Morse mystery
- a fantasy novel by Garth Nix (author of the Keys to the Kingdom series)
- The Starving Student's Vegetarian Cookbook
At $2 for the hardcover and $1 in line with paperback, we spent a whole of five greenbacks.
So how is it that I now have a stack of nine additional books on the table in the back room, which has become our unofficial holding area for books waiting in line to be read? Answer: the real bonanza of the library book sale comes on the Monday after the sale officially ends, when the library offers up the leftover books for free to anyone who's willing to take them. I usually take home a lot more books from the post-sale than I do from the sale, not just because they're free, but also because I can actually take the time to consider books that I barely glanced at on Saturday. There are usually a couple of other people in the room browsing through the discarded books along with me, but nothing like the kind of crowds there were over the weekend, so I can "shop" at leisure. I can examine every title instead of just taking in a box at a glance and picking up anything that jumps out at me. If something looks potentially interesting, I can actually take the time to pick it up and read the first page; if it holds my attention that long, I have no reason not to go ahead and add it to the stack, because what the heck, it's free. As a result, I'm a lot more likely to end up with intriguing-looking titles by authors I've never even heard of, like Waiting for the Galactic Bus or The Dyke and the Dybbuk, which I'd most likely pass over unexamined during the hurly-burly of the sale itself. I even picked up a couple today that I probably would have been willing to pay for, like the Mother Earth News publication Living on Less (a potential treasure trove of material for this blog) and a collection of little-known writings by Ben Franklin, bearing the giggle-inspiring title Fart Proudly. These would almost surely have ended up in our bag if I'd spotted them on Saturday, but they were either hidden in the boxes under the tables or buried in a mass of other volumes that I couldn't take the time to examine carefully.
So, on the one hand, I'm quite pleased with my haul, which now totals 13 books for a mere 5 bucks. But at the same time, I'm a little disappointed to see how much potential revenue the library is losing out on by having so many books that clearly are of interest to people like me go unsold. I wonder if there's anything they could do to improve the shopping conditions at the sale so that people would find it easier to browse the books and, potentially, pick up more of them. The biggest problem is that the little back room where the sale is held is so small, so I'm wondering whether the sale might be able to spread into some additional spaces in the library, such as the individual study rooms. Perhaps each of these small rooms could house a different category of books, so that people interested in one specific genre could focus on those areas and avoid getting in the way of others who prefer different subjects.
The problem, I suspect, is that the librarians don't want the noise and bustle of the sale to interfere, any more than necessary, with the regular functions of the library. But I wonder whether maybe they would be better off just declaring the library officially closed for those two days and turning over the entire space to the sale. The library is already closed on alternating Saturdays and Sundays, so it would only be one day of library access lost. Of course, that would mean that those who use the library every weekend would have to go a week without, and it seems like that happens often enough as it is, with the library closing all weekend for every conceivable holiday from Presidents' Day to Labor Day. But then, maybe if they could raise enough money with the book sale, they might actually be able to keep it open more often, so the patrons would gain more library time in the long run.
On the other hand, maybe the sale is about as successful already as it can stand to be, and I should quit looking a gift book in the mouth.
