Wednesday, October 18, 2023

Can't resist a library sale

Older Daughter caught wind of a library sale being held in a tiny nearby town. We made plans to go, though to be honest we didn't expect much. The town is small and isolated. How big could the sale be?

While we made plans to arrive at the opening of the sale, we didn't anticipate much competition. After all, how many other bibliophiles were there in this small and isolated town?

We were happily surprised on both counts. Not only was the selection extremely large for a library that size...

...but it seemed every homeschooling family for miles around had arrived to pick over the books. Yes! It was wonderful to see so many kids. (As we were checking out, a little boy belonging to the family ahead of us was clutching a small but old book against his chest protectively, very proud of the fact that he had paid for it with his own money. I don't know what the book was, but the kid looked over the moon.)

Ahem, I came home with a carton-full. Total cost? Eight dollars.

It's just so hard to resist a library sale.

8 comments:

  1. I also love library book sales. My husband says that I like to rescue books :) When my daughter was around 9 years old she said she one day wanted to live in a library. My husband told her to look around our house and that she already did :)

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  2. Love book sales, hard to resist. Looks like you got some treasures

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  3. You make me laugh Patrice. Your abundant joy over books is wonderful to see.

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  4. Something strange happening to libraries. I live in a very large metropolitan area about 4-5 million. I went to two large libraries near me looking for some books. The same kinds of books I would find in the last city I lived in with under 50K residents. These are both large buildings with room for millions of books. But the shelves are nearly empty. I mean perhaps 10 books on a single vertical set of shelves that could easily hold a few hundred book. An entire aisle with maybe 100-200 books with room for 5000 books. I went back to the electronic catalog and searched by call number for a particular subject area I would find no books. If I searched by title or subject I would find books in the catalog but they were not in the library. For example book on foraging, none. Ditto for some other subject areas that I was interested in. Very strange.

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  5. Do you have many live auctions/estate sales in your area? We have several a month here in my region and many have books, especially older and harder to find ones and nobody wants them. You can get boxes of books for $1, many times they don't even sell. We got 80 old milk crates full of books for $100 last summer at an auction, mainly because we wanted the milk crates and it was sold as a lot, but found many complete book sets and many treasures in the mix, the rest we didn't want we put in boxes by the road with a free sign and all but about 3 boxes worth disappeared that we ended up taking to a thrift store. To finish off sets when I'm just missing a couple books, I tend to get them from thriftbooks or abebooks online. I'm a person who cannot handle missing just 1 or 2 books from a set.

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  6. Book lover here, too! I love library and church book sales. Oh the treasures I have walked away with for a mere couple bucks! Sometimes free!

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  7. That looks like a great sale! Some of my most cherished books are ones my parents let me get at our library book sales when I was a kid.

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  8. Our adult daughter Beth was recently reading a book while things were slow at the gas station where she works. A man came up to her to thank her for reading. He said his young daughter asked him why was reading. He told her that Beth wanted to get smarter and learn things. His daughter replied that SHE was going to read because she wanted to get smarter, too. Books are pretty cool. 💗

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