giving away books

Putting Books In Hands

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by Jas Faulkner
BookClubSoapI swear, there are days when writing for this site feels like I’ve been jumped in to The Fight Club.

“You can write about this, but you can’t tell where…”

“I would appreciate it if you didn’t reveal my sources for….”

“Just don’t use my name.”

Okay, maybe it’s not exactly like The Fight Club.  After all, I’ve been talking about The Fight Club and the first rule of The Fight Club is you don’t talk about The Fight Club.  To be fair, the former social worker in me gets it.  Stay in the field long enough and you get a mental rolodex going for the official and not-quite-so-official sources for everything anyone might need and there are times when you feel protective of that information.  There is always that fear that someone will not understand the delicate balance that has to be maintained in order to keep that resource available when someone needs it.

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A Small, Lost Library

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by Jas Faulkner

Over the past few years, I have been involved with a number of programs that involved giving away books or “releasing” them in areas where they would hopefully find new homes or at least the attention of another reader until they were passed on.  As someone who loves books and owns her own personal library, it is hard to imagine a home without books.

I know they exist.  As a child, I saw a few of them when visiting the homes of classmates.  There was something rather sterile about those houses.  The perfectly turned out living rooms with blond wood furniture, windows and glass front doors that shone seamlessly, devoid of nose prints from dogs and fingerprints from little brothers just never felt welcoming to me.   My parents were sometimes dismayed that my favourite babysitter was a rather scattered elderly woman who lived in a timeworn Victorian house with her grown daughter, a half-dozen dogs who had the run of the place inside and out and bookshelves jammed into odd corners with old, odd bits of furniture nearby to settle in for a good read.

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Live Nude Texts!

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by Jas Faulkner 

When I was in college, there was a girl on my floor whose mother managed a Waldenbooks in her hometown.  Whenever the mom visited, bearing a cache of food and supplies for her daughter, she would also bring  two or three boxes of paperbacks that had been stripped of their front covers for everyone to dig through.

Being a thoughtful sort of person who understood what it was like to love books and have every bit of one’s disposable income go towards ugly, overproduced and underedited required texts; she made it as easy as possible for people to find books they would love.  Every box was packed one layer thick with the spines facing up so there were no surprises.  Sometimes the spines of the books were reinforced with clear packing tape.  I figure it was busy work for slow times in an already neat as a pin store.

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Mr Book it is the End of the Line for you

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I, like many other secondhand book shop owning hopefuls, came here by the hobby turning to business route. One of the handicaps of this background is that your love of books can make it difficult to to decide when a book is simply not saleable and it has to go. And then off course, once you make that decision, where does it go?

Every so often I have been asked to donate books to send to exotic locations like Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea and I respond with gusto. Beautiful sets of Britannica, maths and science textbooks that have suffered only from inbuilt obsolescence due to bi-annual updates, time life library books, exlibrary books, childrens’ non fiction, picture books; anything in good condition that I have an excess of that could be put to better use overseas I happily waved bon voyage to.

But I can no longer store books just in case someone contacts me for a similar scheme (though if someone knows of one leaving Melbourne Australia anytime soon let me know and I will accumulate some books for you). Any spare capacity has been long consumed by the endless parade of books that are traded in on a daily basis. Too many days of bring in 10 take out 2 have seen to that.

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