Spring Book Sale a Success

VGPL’s 24th annual Spring Book Sale, held May 7-9, raised more than $10,000 for the library! That money goes directly to provide you, the VGPL library patron, with services including additions to the materials collection and educational programming and events for children and adults. The equation is simple: you donate a book and we go to work to maximize its market potential to better serve all library patrons. 

The book sales are a popular, fun community event, but they are also a vital piece of the library’s bottom line, contributing nearly 10% of the overall operating budget.

What Happens Once You Donate a Book?

When you donate books or media to the library, you’re making an investment in this independent library. VGPL does not receive the same public funding city and county libraries such as the Santa Fe Library system do. From the beginning, VGPL has required private donations from the community to stay open.

When you drop off your donation, the staff and book sale committee go into action! It begins a lengthy process that culminates in the Spring and Fall Book Sales. Many volunteers spend many labor hours sorting and hauling thousands of books and media during the six months prior to each sale. We have teams for assessing books, publicity, bookkeeping, sale layout, and volunteer management, to name a few (thank you, volunteers!).

Our goals are to provide an enjoyable shopping experience for our patrons, make money for VGPL, and keep items out of the landfills.

Step 1. Once you donate your book or media, the library staff members assess it for the library’s collection. If it is something the library needs and is in excellent condition, it goes on the shelves or into the Book Store. The “store” is located just next to the Circulation Desk.

Step 2. The remaining items are assessed for the Book Sale. Each item must meet the sale’s quality standards and be suitable for our key Book Sale demographic: library patrons, general community, and book sellers.

Step 3. Books that are not earmarked for the sale, library, or book store are boxed up for a used-book reseller based in Albuquerque. This is a new partnership for us -- and a lucrative one. Where we used to give these boxes of books (up to 30 a month and up to 100 after each sale) to a nationwide reselling organization for free in return for them hauling the books away, our new partner pays us $5 a box while also hauling away the boxes himself. This is more profitable than it sounds! Consider that there were 90-plus boxes of UNSOLD books at the end of the Spring Book Sale. Not only did our partner haul these books away and pay us nearly $500, but he also pitched in to help our tear-down volunteers break down and move tables into trucks. A true win-win.

Step 4. Books destined for the book sale are boxed up and stored until the monthly “sortings.” At the sorting, a team of VGPL volunteers unpacks each box, sorts the books into genres and then re-boxes them. The 30 to 60 resulting boxes are hauled into storage to await the sale.

Step 5. The physical set up for each Book Sale takes a full week. The boxes of books are hauled in, laid out on tables, and organized for the Sale. Each sale, we strive to find ways to increase the sales total and attract more shoppers including book sellers. This year, we added a new pre-sale event for an entry fee of $50. The event is open to anyone interested in getting the first look at what we have available. Once in the sale, everyone pays the same price for material. This year, we also added a special “buy one hardcover, get a second one for half price” sale on Friday and invited Eldorado’s Hello Sweet Cream Ice Cream to sell ice cream bars and cups.

Albert Einstein once said that “the only thing that you absolutely have to know is the location of the library.” You need only a library card to discover the world. While modern technologies have increased the availability and variety of information beyond anything Einstein may have imagined, the library remains not only a cornerstone of knowledge, but also of community. We can’t imagine our community without VGPL, and we know you can’t either.

Thank you, from all of us, for 25 years of generous and loyal support.

--Monica Emerich and Melissa Pfeiffer, Book Sale Co-Chairs