Book Sale Time: It's Ok To Be Shelf-Indulgent!


We're down to one week of taking donations for our Pages for Pennies used book sale. Or as I like to call it, The Most Wonderful Time of the Year! We turn our local convention center's expo hall into a book lover's paradise with gently loved books, CDs, DVDs, LPs, audio books, games, and puzzles. Almost everything is $2 or under, making it literally trading pennies for pages.


There are so many things that I love about this sale, but particularly that the hundreds of thousands of books come from donations from our community. This year we've received entire estate book collections, boxes cleaned out from attics, basements, and storage units, as well as books from last year's sale that readers are dropping off so they have room to buy more in two weeks.


We are an entirely volunteer corps, book lovers all. We take donations for five weeks, sort them by quality and then by genre, and box them up. It's a pretty thought-involved process, but it's so much fun! The sale is Friday-Sunday, September 26-28, so we'll start moving books down the Monday morning before and have everything set up on the sale tables within a day or two. It might be a physical job at that point, but it's so worth it to get books into the hands of people who want to read them and love them.


This sale will always have special meaning to me because my mom and I shopped it together every year, even before it was my event. There were three years before she died that I took her over the Thursday night before the sale and let her pick out whatever she wanted. We were there for hours while she looked through her favorite genres. Her happiness meant everything to me, and it's a joy to watch moms and daughters shop for books together now.

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