The Joy of Library Book Sales!
The secret to building a library of used books affordably. How to find and make the most of library sales.
This is the monthly post in our series (for paid subscribers) "How to Read Voraciously and Build a Personal Library Without Breaking the Bank." Here are the previous three posts in the series:
(Part One) This Habit Can Save You Hundreds of Dollars on Books!
(Part Two) Mindful Practices of Book Buying
(Part Three) Being Generous in Our Bookbuying Habits
(Part Four) How to Make the Most of Your Local Library
Earlier this week, I spent quite a few hours over two days at one of my favorite places in the world… The Indianapolis Public Library’s bimonthly book sale! My visit to this sale coincided perfectly with a post that I wanted to write here about library book sales.
If you want to build a library of print books
that are relevant to your interests,
the library book sale is the most affordable way to do so!
This post is for paid subscribers, but I will spill my secret here at the top for all readers of this Substack – free or paid. If you want to build a library of print books that are relevant to your interests, the library book sale is the most affordable way to do so! Most libraries – public or university – will run a book sale. Some, like the one here in Indianapolis, are regular affairs, others are held sporadically. Some sales run continually (I’m also particularly fond of the library bookstore in Bloomington, Indiana, a small university city where I lived while in graduate school), others are monthly, semi-annual, or annual (or some other frequency in that range.) While the typical prices at these sales are usually fabulous (often $3 or less per book), they also often run steeply discounted sales to help clear out their inventory. It’s not unusual to find half-price sales or bag/box sales where you can fill a bag or box for a set price (often $10 or less!)
Generally, books offered at these sales come from one of two sources: 1) books that have been pulled from the library’s collections, and 2) books that have been donated to the library, but which, for one reason or another, are not added to the library’s collection. The former category of books usually are a little more worn, and often affixed with library stickers and stamps, which are anathema to book collecting purists. (Paid subscribers, keep reading for recommendations on how to find the library book sales closest to you, and how to get the most out of a library sale.)
Above is a quick snapshot of some of the gems that I found this week in the Indianapolis library sale. I just grabbed a few books from the top of a couple of bags/boxes and shot a photo. This is only a handful of the 200+ books that I bought. In the center of the photo is probably my most astonishing find of the sale, a British first paperback edition of C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy (1959). It’s not in spectacular shape, and it is a paperback after all, but to find this gem tucked away on a shelf of religious paperbacks and to purchase it for a few cents, is a good illustration of the joy a book lover can find at a library book sale! Also of note is the origami book on the left. I’ve been getting into origami recently (turning discarded books from our little store into magical paper creatures), and I actually have several origami books – including this very one – on hold for me at my local library branch. And of course classic books by Thomas Merton, Marilynne Robinson, Robert Putnam, and Ursula Le Guin!
I took home over 200 books, about half of which I bought during my first day at the sale which featured the library’s bag sale ($8 for a paper grocery bag full of books). I bought 3 bags total, bringing my purchase cost for the sale to a whopping $24. The vast majority of these books from the first day will be sold off to help fund the work of The Englewood Review of Books. The other half of the books I got on the second day, in a special post-sale event in which the library allows non-profits to take any remaining books from the sale for free. They do stipulate that that these free books are not to be sold, but I had no trouble finding books that I wanted to give away, or books for our libraries here at the church (with growing collections in poetry, fiction, monasticism, and theology, among others), or books with colorful pages that will be delightful to use for origami or other craft projects. If all the books were to be sold, they’d bring well over $1000, and conservatively, I’d wager that the books I intend to sell will easily bring over $500 – though it may take a year or more to find buyers for them. And it should be noted that I pulled these books at the very end of the sale, when presumably it had been heavily picked over by other book dealers mining it for profitable titles to sell.
So, whether you want to build your own library or to find used books to sell, library book sales are spectacular, especially if you have the time and patience to browse them carefully. Here are a few tips on finding sales and shopping at them that I’ve learned from over 3 decades of shopping at library book sales… (for our paid subscribers. But seriously, the few tips below will save you MUCH more $$$ than the price of an annual subscription to this Substack!)