Friends Group

I belong to the Friends of the Jacksonville Public Library. The Friends group sells books culled from the libraries shelves and donations. They do about 3 large warehouse sales a year. Three times a week we work in the warehouse to sort all these donations...there are many, many, many flats full of books to sort!!!

Early this year the Friends president asked if anyone had a suggestion were they could sell more books outside of the warehouse sale. There is a small reenactment in Jacksonville the last weekend of January. I suggested we pull together as many antebellum and Civil War books and take them to our (Jacksonville) reenactment. They were skeptical at first...but agreed to give it a chance.

Life's lesson - when you volunteer/suggest you are put in charge. LOL

The volunteers pulled together 11 boxes of books and sign up enough volunteers to help sell the book. Luckily the books and table fit into my car. Saturday was our first day and we did wonderfully, selling about almost half of the books! Many of the reenactors thanked us for bringing out the books. We handed out many "Friends of JPL" membership forms and advertised the next big warehouse sale, set for the first weekend of March.  Not bad for our first day. Off to today's sale...to sell them all !!! :)


Monday January 30, 2012

Well we didn't sell all the books but made a huge dent in the boxes we brought out! What is funny are the number of older reenacting soldiers either ignored our table or would say I've got them all, then would pick up one to purchase....A young soldier purchased a 9 book set of Lincoln's speeches from 1842-1865 for $15 and took them back to camp (printed in the 1940's). One soldier came over after this sale and made the biggest purchase of all. He even said he hadn't thought we would have any good books. On the first day we sold a 1866 history of Lincoln, the only condition issue was the spine cover was missing.

Never pass up a used book sale!