How to Run a Library Book Sale

You need three things to hold a library book sale: books, people, and a place.

BOOKS

For convenience, I'm calling what you sell "books," and probably most of it will really be books, but some will be magazines, DVD's, CD's, etc. Most of your materials, especially at first, will come from the library. To make room for new books, they must always be cancelling and discarding old ones. These are your merchandise.

You can also put the word out that you will take donations. Do NOT offer to pick them up! Trust me on this - the people who call you and tell you they have huge numbers of wonderful books, actually have thirty old textbooks that smell moldy, and one copy of Four Days, that book about Kennedy's assassination and burial.

Most of your good donated books will come from people who bring them in, people who visit the library regularly and can drop their used books off when they come. There will be people who call and ask for pickup, and you can do as you like about accommodating them, but don't advertise that you'll pick up.

PEOPLE

The people you need to do the work are usually a group called the Friends of Anytown Public Library. You probably have a Friends group already, or you wouldn't be contemplating a sale, but if you don't, you can start one.

Whether you are starting a group, or having a sale, the first person you need to consult is the library director. Friends and directors sometimes find themselves at loggerheads; don't let that happen to you. The director is the boss; you are trying to make things easier for her, and if she's not on your side, you can't do anything. Go along with her quirks if you possibly can.

Other people involved are library staff. You may think they aren't, but they are. They are the ones who cancel the books, who answer the phone and tell people when the sale is, who get books returned that were cancelled and sold in 1992, and who have endless people bringing in books to donate, that they must hold for you, or put in the place designated. They are the ones who will help the people who are looking for the sale, and who, having come for the sale, decide to check out some library books as well, and confuse the two.

Of course, book selectors on the staff get first crack at donated books, to see if any of them are useful for their collection. But more, if they want to come in while you're setting up books, if they want to spend their lunch hour looking through the books and buying some, why not? They may or may not be members of the Friends, but staff should be treasured and cared for.

PLACE

The place can be a real problem. Actually, you need two places, which may or may not be the same one. You need a place for the sale, and a place to store books until the sale.

In the absolute ideal situation, there's a room you can store the books in and also have the sale in. One library near us has that arrangement. They have a couple of sales a year, and in between sales, they keep arranging the books on the shelves, so when sale time comes, the books are largely set up already. People are still needed to set up tables for various categories that will be displayed differently, etc., but most of the arranging is done beforehand.

In another library, the books are packed in boxes in a storeroom, and the largest part of the pre-sale work involves transporting them on carts to the sale room.

There are libraries that have their sales off-site, but this is a huge amount of work. My own Friends group did this, during library renovations. We rented a truck and got help from young, strong men who had been sentenced to do community service. And quite helpful they were, some of them. We got a huge community room for the sale, and it was very successful, and nice for the browsers. But there's no denying that it was a major headache.

Another library, in a similar situation, didn't even have a place to store the books, and had to rent a vacant storefront. People would go over there to sort books in the months before the sale.

In the summertime in the North, or the wintertime in the South, you might want to rent one of those huge pavilion tents and have your sale on the front lawn. That attracts browsers, especially if you offer hot dogs, too!

HOW YOU DO IT

Arranging the books.

I've seen small sales in which the books were not arranged at all, just laid out in boxes on the floor. For a larger sale, your customers are more likely to find what they want if you categorize the books in some manner.

Since a lot of your books come from the library, it might be easiest just to use the numbers on the spines, and arrange them roughly the same as the library does. That's what we do (all 100's in one place, all 200's in another - we don't attempt to put them in exact order), but it gets less easy as you get more and more donated books - and you will. If someone who works at the library is in your Friends group, that person might be able to sort books better than others can.

If you want to make up your own categories, you'll definitely need one for general fiction and one for mysteries. You might need a science fiction/fantasy category, too, and a Western category.

In nonfiction, there's always a call for cookbooks, so many sales have a special place for them. Other possible categories are Biography, Computers, Religion and Philosophy, Politics, Education, Crime, Science and Math, Health, Gardening, Pets, Sports, Entertainment, Arts and Crafts, History and Geography.

There will be a big call for children's books, so they need a separate category, too. You may want to put mass-market paperbacks (those are the small ones) on separate tables or shelves, just because they're easier to handle that way. Same for audio-video stuff.

Our sale puts foreign-language books in the 400's, but if yours has hundreds of books in one language, like Spanish, they'll need a separate place, also.

There are all different ways to arrange the materials, and each way has problems.

One thing I wish our group had done at the beginning was to have a sort of gripe session after each sale, so we could have decided what things to try differently next time.

As the years go by, it gets harder and harder to change things, because book sale customers are very loyal and keep coming back. We have two sales a year (we call them "book fairs" in an attempt to avoid any trouble with sales tax, which we're not authorized to collect and couldn't handle if we were). One year, the date was changed, and we had people coming in on the wrong date, just because they knew our sales were always the last full weekends in October and April.

Pricing

Prices are determined by the relationship between two facts. One, you want to earn money for the library. Two, you need to get rid of the books. If you wind up dumpstering books, it's gonna cost you at least $350.00 for the dumpster. And holding books over for the next sale isn't usually a good idea: it makes your sales gradually less interesting.

Pricing individually is usually prohibitively expensive in terms of volunteer time, except for a small "special" table with exceptional books.

For everything else, use a standard pricing policy, and simple prices. Consider that the people doing the checkout are amateurs under pressure, and many of them are retirees. What you don't want is some poor volunteer with fifty people in line trying to count up books that are $1.35 or 65¢.

Our sale charges fifty cents for a hardback and twenty-five cents for a paperback. (After a lot of talk during the early days, we've firmly decided that "a paperback" is any soft-bound book, whether it's a Harlequin romance or a huge book of photographs.)

Another group charges a dollar for a hardback, also a simple amount to add. Magazines can be bundled to come out to an even amount. Audio-visual materials, also, should be priced as simply as possible. Don't make your checkers count how many DVD's make up that series; count it as one item if it's in one case. Simplicity above all!

Timing

When you have your sale will depend on when you can get the space. Some are one-day sales; some go longer. Our sale runs Friday evening for members of the Friends (you can join at the door), Saturday for everyone, and Sunday for bag day.

There's a long line when we open, and we let handicapped people in first.

On Sunday, we sell large grocery bags for $2.00, and buyers can fill them as high as they want. It's much easier that way, than having people line up for checkout after they've filled the bags. Most library sales have something to clear books out near the end -- it could be a dollar a bag, it could be half price.

Small problems you will face.

1. Confusion between library and sale books. Try not to let people take sale books into the library, or library books into the sale.

2. Angry customers who don't see why the library should cancel so many books. All you can do is to tell them that people are unhappy if the library doesn't have new books, and that means getting rid of old ones. This won't satisfy them.

3. People who grab up every book that might interest them, and then sit on the floor blocking aisles and go through what they've got to decide which they'll actually buy. Afterwards, they generally leave their discards in a pile on the floor. If you find a cure for this, let me know!

4. People who shop till they drop and want you to hold their stuff while they look some more. How we handle this is, we have a bunch of library carts and post-it notes, and tell them that we aren't going to guard their stuff, but they can label their pile and put it on a cart.

5. People who want to bargain. You can either have a no bargaining rule, or have one person in charge of prices and let that person bargain. We don't give discounts for quantity, but our book sale chairman has been known to bargain over the prices on the "special" table - $10 instead of $15, say, or $200 instead of $300 for a very special set of books.

Afterwards

You need a plan to get rid of the books that are left. This can be the responsibility of a board member, or a committee.

What's left over has gone to various places. Hospitals sometimes need paperbacks. There are schools that will take children's books. One college library wanted almost anything; they had practically no budget, and used our books to fill out their book sale. There's a man who sends stuff to Africa. It all goes somewhere; there's rarely a need for a dumpster.

And then all of us in the Friends take three deep breaths and start preparing for the next sale!