The Book Donation Blues---_Again

I have ranted previously on the junk books people are kind enough to donate to the library. We put a great many of them in our library book sale. This allows us to purchase all the things the library budget somehow doesn't cover--though it should.

We had a ton of books in our storage area. And it occurred to me that if we sorted them by subject, we could set them up that way at the sale. We've always just sorted them by fiction and nonfiction, and it makes it hard to find books by topic. But if people can find what they want, they'll buy it. More books bought=more money for our library fund. Worth a try.

So I decided to take on the task of sorting them.

Memo to self: next time I decide to volunteer to do something, turn and flee in the other direction. Rapidly..........

Thing is, the shelves were crammed with books. More books in boxes. More books on booktrucks. And barely room to turn around in, let alone sort books. And what kind of books?

Lots of good ones. But it was hard to find the good ones, because the good ones were mixed in with tons of junk.

Things like political treatises from the Kennedy administration. Ten year old books on computer systems long retired. Medical books from the 70s. Biographies of long, long forgotten politicians. Economic theories from the 90s. Job search books that predate the Internet. You get the idea.........

The credit for assembling this collection largely goes to our resident schlemiel.  One of his regular jobs is supposed to be dealing with the donations. But he just doesn't seem to get that nobody is going to buy old, worn, dated books. Instead of tossing them, he puts them in the booksale!

We have another assistant who is smart and organized and tries to remove the stuff as she sees it. And I do the same, but somehow, tons of it has reached the shelves. So I have spent the last few days sorting the books by category and boxing up tons of rejects.

It's mostly finished. I think it will work well, and I think we can come up with a method for the next sale that will help us to set this up in advance. Though I doubt if there's much we can do about the schelemiel. Oy..

Here's my song on the subject. Those of you who are fans of Doctor Demento will recognize the origin and know the tune:

Dead bookies, dead bookies, dead bookies aren't much fun.
They don't sell, in our sale, please don't drop them in our mail.
Dead bookies aren't much fun......................

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