The Fall Friends of the Seattle Public Library Book Sale starts today and runs through Sept. 27. All three days of the Friends of the Seattle Public Library Book Sale will have people lined up around the old hangar at Magnusson Park, waiting to get at the more than 200,000 books for sale. Most are priced at $1, and many are the kinds of gems you would love to have in your personal library. Plus, if you were thinking about contributing to Eco Encore, spending a few extra dollars on books for donation could raise a lot more than that for our recipient partners when we resell them.
The bi-annual Friends of the Seattle Public Library Book Sale is an event every Seattleite has to see at least once. I'd never seen so many librophiles in one place before, and they far outnumbered the booksellers with their towering shopping carts, and more recently the day laborers paid to walk the aisles with their electronic book scanners. It really comes down to this: 200,000 books is a lot of books, so many that some of the boxes don't get opened or put on tables until even the last day. So on Sunday when the lot has been pretty well picked through and everything's half price, there are still great finds to be had. For example, I've found on the last day in sales past:
- Almost two full boxes of Booker Prize-winning The Life of Pi in pristine, unread paperback
- The Old Man and the Sea paperback in new condition
- Selected Poems of Carl Sandburg 1926 hardcover edition with original woodcut design dust jacket
- The Toughest Indian in the World, Sherman Alexie (my favorite collection of his)
- Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman, 1940 edition with pristine pages and color illustrations
- Chinese Love Poems, 1942 stunningly beautiful hardcover edition, pristine inside its corner-worn original box (which revealed that Chinese poets did not share the romantic idealism about love with their American counterparts."
And there are others.
So get out there this weekend and find some gems, those for your own library as well as some for the Eco Encore shelves. Maybe I'll see you there.
