Bookstore owner George Nye drove 489 miles to downtown Gainesville last week from the mountains of North Carolina so he could set up a lawn chair and wait.
Nye, owner of Got Books! in Shelby, N.C., hunkered down outside the Friends of the Library “Bookhouse” on North Main Street by 3 p.m. Friday for the used-book sale that opened the next day.
“I’ve been coming here for 18 years,” Nye said. He didn’t plan to budge for the next 18 hours, when the doors of the twice-annual sale opened.
The line was already growing by 4:30 a.m. Saturday, when Brittany and Zack Casey arrived to secure their spot. Bibliophiles soon stretched far down the block and wound around the corner. The Casey’s drove from Orlando with 12 cardboard boxes. They planned to fill them with more than 200 pounds of books, all for their own reading pleasure.
The doors opened at 9:05 a.m., and the Gainesville Ukulele Club welcomed the human wave into the 14,000-square-foot warehouse. Friends of the Library (FOL) volunteers call it the “Bookhouse.”
“This is the biggest sale I’ve ever seen,” Brittany Casey said.
Thousands of people a day come through the sale, perusing hundreds of thousands of items. Books, vinyl records, CDs, sheet music and more are packed into shelves, crates and cardboard boxes. Book prices range from twenty-five cents to hundreds or even thousands of dollars for the rarest collector’s finds; some books at the spring sale date to the 16th century.
Spanning five exhilarating days, the sale culminates in a frenzy of bargain shopping on Tuesday, when all items are half price, and Wednesday, when a dime buys anything left in the inventory. For safety reasons, FOL had to institute a “No Wagons” policy. You can take as much as you can carry or as much as you can push in front of you; shopping carts are still allowed.
Now in its 70th year, FOL is an independent, non-profit support organization of the Alachua County Library District. Dedicated volunteers, predominantly seniors, orchestrate logistics for the sale. From collecting donations to categorizing and replenishing stock, their efforts lay the foundation for FOL’s success. “We’re all about twenty years old and have nothing better to do,” joked Sue Morris, 80, a retired nurse and social worker.
FOL’s first sale, in 1954, netted eighty dollars. A few years later, they made their first donation to the library system, $600 for folding doors.
Preparations for each sale begin as soon as the previous one ends. It takes 52 weeks a year to organize an event of this scale, and hundreds of people working together. Donors pull up to the Bookhouse year-round to drop off books from the back of their cars. Some donate one or two titles, others one or two boxes. The fittest volunteers carry the books from the parking lot into the warehouse, where they’re loaded onto carts. The carts are pushed to tables where sorters organize them by genre and rarity.
The rarest book ever sold at the sale, FOL records show, was a 1st edition copy of “A Farewell to Arms,” autographed by Ernest Hemingway. It fetched $17,000.
The volunteers also separate out all the fascinating little keepsakes that people leave in books, separating them for sale as ephemera. They’ve found money, Eastern Airlines boarding passes, love letters and comic strips. And they have the difficult task of weeding out books in too poor condition for the sale, though centuries-old titles appear on FOL shelves.
The oldest for sale this year, a work on the Roman philosopher Apuleius, published in 1533, is covered carefully in cheesecloth.
Other volunteers fill the warehouse shelves and re-stock boxes. Buyers wipe the warehouse almost entirely out each day of the sale. And each day, the volunteers restock with fresh books. That’s right, there’s no need to camp out, though everyone respects the commitment.
Above: Time Lapse video of the line wrapped around the Friends of the Library book sale on Saturday morning, 15 minutes before the doors opened. (Nathan Thomas/WUFT News)
Once the doors open, the mad rush begins. Books fly off the shelves as 450 people at a time scramble for dirt-cheap books. College students with cardboard boxes fill up on classic literature as a mother pushing a stroller peruses the kids' section. A line forms as young people push forward to the manga in the temperature-controlled section dedicated to art, prints, board games and comic books.
The funds all go to literacy and access to books, though over the last few years, FOL has had to pay significant overhead. The nonprofit bought the warehouse in 1989, and just last year made enough to pay off the mortgage. Now, volunteers want to update the warehouse, including a new roof and much-needed air conditioning.
FOL also has to pick up the bill for the extra security needed during the sale. Gainesville’s twice-annual downtown traffic jam, and waves of pedestrians flooding through the area, require multiple police officers who patrol and direct traffic.
FOL is still able to support its mini-grants for local organizations to help promote literacy. Groups can apply for up to $2,000 through the FOL website. One such recipient is Gainesville Community Ministry, a nonprofit that provides practical assistance to those vulnerable to economic crises, or who have fallen through the cracks of other programs. FOL helped them modernize their GED Study Program, buying laptop computers and books.
Michael Wright, the Ministry’s executive director, said the program helped 18 people earn their GED last year. He recalled one graduate who got a promotion at work thanks to the credential. “She finished it in three months, got her high school diploma, and got her promotion at the University of Florida,” Wright said. “So she no longer needed food from our pantry or any of the other assistance that we have because she was able now to afford it.”
Brad McClenny, a spokesman for the Alachua County Library System, said FOL has donated $5.6 million to the public libraries since 1986. They’ve paid an additional $350,000 in scholarships for library staff.
“We are very fortunate to have such a healthy and active Friends group here in Alachua County,” said Shaney T. Livingston, director of the Alachua County Library District. “The amount of time and funds they have provided through the years have enhanced the library experience in so many meaningful ways.”
The organization’s literacy contributions are far-reaching. In addition to sponsoring community events and supporting local libraries, the group sends books to incarcerated people in the area.
Within these book shelves full of treasures lies a 70-year legacy of promoting literacy. The tireless efforts of volunteers, spanning generations, underscores the organization's mission of promoting knowledge as a right. In the face of mounting challenges to literacy, from stagnant state support for libraries to societal shifts in reading habits, it’s good to have Friends.