Music, Music , Music - we have had three volunteers working on boxes of cds for several days now. Our first step is to see if they are worth more than $5, if so then they do online. If not, are they in good condition - nice case, not scratched - $2.00 for the sale. The ones going online head to the library RTI DisChek Machine (we purchased for the library -$3,200). The machine checks for defects. Then on to the polishing machines, we have purchased several and also spendy. The ones for our sale that are in poor condition go through the polishing ones also. We are going to have a massiveamount of cds at our sale. Also the LPs have been coming in. Have some 78s that I'm not sure how to price.
Today, I've been working on maps. We have the bigger laminated ones from the library plus lots of little ones.
The boxes are piling up and we are on a great tract for an excellent sale.

Not sure on the de-smeller machine yet. The problem is you can only smell so many before you lose the ability to judge. We think it is doing a good job on the more porous books but time will tell.
Tons - literally -of donations and deletes have shown up this week. What an interesting batch of deletes we are getting, things to make the reference and history readers shell out their hard earned money. I especially liked the DK History of Rock and Roll . I think I'll put that out on our permanent sales shelves (Pass the welcome desk, take a right at the donut shop).
I am working on an hypothesize about the type and condition of the box versus the worth of the contents. Patrons do donate an amazing assortment of wonderful item but there is also a great deal of debris.
Our box counts keep rising, children are ahead as usual but I am surprised at how well we are doing in Spanish and Video - thank you to the patron who donated 400 very nice videos this week. We have already sold a few online. Who would have thought that Strategic Air Command with James Steward would sell for $23?
Happy Father's Day to all who are celebrating. My daughter in law is going to attempt creme brulee.

We have been blown away with donations these last few days, I think that people decided that it was never going to stop showering - raining and they might as well get their stuff out. My favorite label on the boxes this week was -garage shit. Did peek in to make sure it wasn't accurately labeled. Just a short time ago, all the boxes were off the floor and then wham! we are filled and heading to alternate storage. I can tell you that there will be masses of LPs at the next sale. Lots of classic and 40s-50s also. a couple boxes of gaming magazines showed up also. I told the donor that they would go to good homes.
In addition, boxes of great childens, history, and art have shown up in our room. We are pricing and boxing as fast as we can because we know that Shute Park Library will be sending over 10,000 items in the next few months. Wow!
We do like to take off the mylar covers, and also make sure the books are not falling apart - we will glue them back together, if we can. Also, a nice clean on the kids books is also called for.
Linda took home this weekend our new anti-smell machine, I'm anxious to hear and smell how it performed.

Sci-Fi was the winner, so far, this week. We just love it when boxes of sci-fi/fantasy come in. CDs are filling up our CD holders. We do need jewel cases, if anyone has any extra. We try to recase all the ex-library and on-line ones if they need it and since the library is getting most of their cds pre-packaged for library use, we no longer snag their new cases when they switch out to library cases.
I just ordered an Odor Free Villa 1000 to deal with the donated musty books and smoky ones too. We have our fingers crossed that this will work - figure one great book on-line will help pay for the machine. We should be taking it out for a spin next week.
Our box numbers have increased - 18 is the new total.
Permenant sale shelves are chock-full of great titles.

If you are a reader of Chinese, today was your day. A full box -35 lbs was taped shut.
We were also trying to get our backlog of books to go online whittled down. As usual something else came up.
Linda, our project oriented volunteer, decided today was a good day for upstairs organizing. It is amazing how much she can get done. For muscle, she brought in Joe, another one of the faithful.
A cart load of books came in late this afternoon and unfortunately, there was a musty odor coming from the box. We live in Oregon - don't leave boxes of books in your garage or basement. I decided to check to see if any were unodoriferous ones. A nice lot of art and childrens were in the boxes. I was innocently sniffing away - nose deep in the book when I realized the page I was on was of a reclining nude and it looked like I was sniffing her naughty parts. Annie was standing behind me - assistant sniffer. We both broke up laughing.
The sale shelves were stocked with some interesting books today - come check it out.

The permanent sale shelves were switched from Hard Back Fiction and Audiobooks on the last day of the sale back to normal. I started switching them back but was "let go" or made redundant, if you like the English term. A little thing like putting all the mass market paperback shelves in crooked.
Kathy marked the shelves so we won't have that problem again. She is also the queen of the alphabet and I consider myself to be alphabetically challenged. We have our fiction in order and by category- regular, mystery, sci-fi and romance.
Children and Non-fiction are pretty much by size. We added a shelf of magazines since they seen to be selling well.
We have good volunteers restocking regularly. Melinda is Monday and Wednesday and Betty is Friday.
On-line is doing well but we have almost caught up with donations and the weeded books. librarians weed their collections for different reasons, such as, not circulating, condition, newer information available, so if you are in the area and want to clean out your shelves come see us. Go to the Welcome Desk and they will call us.We have a nice hand truck and flatbed cart to help bring them in.
The dust has hardly settled but we already have about 10 boxes going to storage. The sale usually has between 400- 600 boxes - in categories and graded.

The police have come and taken away the stroller. I called Costco because there was a receipt in the stroller and they said they would call the member's number a tell them about the stroller.
In other news, we went 25% over last years total. How is that for cool. Thanks to the many great volunteer who worked their fingers to the bone. Actually, we all were talking about breaking nails.
Melinda was the one in the main room directing customers and trying to find books and sell them more. Annie was bringing in all the carts she was pricing, Kathy was carting too. Linda was also keeping up with our amazon on-line sales. And a host of others, Great job all.
Kathy, Annie disposed of our least favorite cash register today. Sorry you missed the ceremony.
the donations have continued through the sale and we received a lot of children's books. We will be boxing the extras - we do have a small permanent sale at the library.

Stroller left behind at Book Sale

A stroller was left behind in Stroller Parking on Thursday or Friday. If you know someone who shopped at our sale who is having trouble remembering where they left their stroller, please give them a hint. It's at the library. Tell them to go to the Welcome Desk and describe it for the nice person who works there. He or she will be happy to reunite the owner with the stroller.

We made it, we are over last year. There are still bunches of books left but we have enough room to bring down our misc. stuff today: Floor rocker chair, Herman Miller Round Table, and framed posters etc. -- maybe even the court reporter machine.
We are pricing as fast as we can to fill the gaps but the buyers are in front of us.

Crazy days! We are heading toward a record. I want to thank several people - the woman who said she came to the sale because of the sign on the overpass. I had to tape it to a guardrail and the truck driver waiting on the off ramp thought it was hilarious, especially when I dropped the scissors. I debated whether to let it go or bend over the rail and show my big butt. Also, thank you to the customer who brought my library book back - we packed it in her bag. It is a great book - the new Sherlock Homes - Mary Russell book. The first in the series is The Beekeepers Apprentice. The volunteers have been great and the Hands on Portland Walk- Ins have been very helpful with our rearranging projects.
Annie, a real pricing worker bee, and I stayed late to get another 5 carts priced and out to fill our gaps.
Today could be the last sale record breaking day. If you are in the area, come help put us over.

It was a record breaking Fri- Sat. Spent this morning checking on our signs, changing their location. It was great meeting our customers yesterday - from Alaska to Ashland, Oregon. There was even a mother -daughter who come down from Kelso, Washington every sale. They are on our postcard mailing list. They went to the car with bags at least three times.
Today, and yesterday, our Friends President came in with boxes of books. She was going to stop packing them up this afternoon but her husband insisted she go through all her boxes of books. Good news for our sale, and since she bought a lot of them at our previous sales - they were already priced. She is a science fiction, fantasy, romance reader.

Same Murder Room wall after 1st day of sale

Here's the same wall in the aftermath of Friday's record-breaking sales. I came in early and restocked from about half a dozen boxes that we hadn't opened yet because there just wasn't any room for them. I also moved overstock down so that all but the top two shelves were full again.

We do restock every day of the sale. We put more items out every morning before the sale opens and whenever we have time throughout the day. Here's a sampling of the books I stocked this afternoon: Worst Case, one of James Patterson's new releases, Kitchen Confidential (Biography), The Book of Useless Information (Reference) and several of Ann Rule's books (True Crime). I put out Children's, general fiction, science fiction (one of our large donations today had a lot of sci-fi/fantasy), romance, mystery and non-fiction in every category.

We received three rather large donations today and will be adding those items to the sale as soon as we can get them priced. We take donations all year long. If you have books to donate, just drop them off at the Welcome Desk. The nice person behind the desk will be happy to give you a donation receipt for your taxes.

One wall of the Murder Room. Just about ready for Friday's opening!

On this wall, the alphabet ranges from Rita Mae Brown at the upper left down to just before Tony Hillerman on the bottom right. The top two shelves are overstock. Click on the picture to see a larger image.

I am amazed at all the parenting, children's reference books that we have. If you know any homeschoolers, tell them about the sale. We still have 50 boxes of stuff tucked away that we started working on today - in addition to emptying the rest of the priced boxes, probably in the range of 400+ to start. Western and Large Print made it out today in our upstairs foyer - tomorrow World Language should hit a table up there also. We have left no space unclaimed.

We started out today with a beautiful, organized room, just waiting for the customers to come. Apparently, if you have a book sale, they will come. We had 5 cash registers going strong for 4 hours and then on and off with lines til 8. Record numbers of people and I'm sure record sales. We are quickly pricing as many books as possible to fill up the the huge gaps that you - the public created in our sale rooms today. I haven't even looked at the upstairs, large print, western, world language area. Tomorrow is another day - good luck to us all.

Book Sale Set-up has begun!

Hi, I'm Kathy and I've been helping Barbara with the book sales since 2004. I volunteered full-time with her until last spring, when I got a full-time job. So now, I help out on weekends when I can.

I worked all weekend setting up The Murder Room, where we stock mysteries. It's in alphabetical order by author and title. We have lots of David Baldacci, Sandra Brown, Agatha Christie, Mary Higgins Clark, Michael Connelly, Patricia Cornwell, Catherine Coulter (her FBI series), Janet Evanovich, Erle Stanley Gardner, Sue Grafton, Tony Hillerman, J.A. Jance, Iris Johansen, The Kellermans, Philip Margolin, Charlotte Macleod, Robert Parker, James Patterson, Ridley Pearson, Anne Perry, Elizabeth Peters, Ellis Peters, J.D. Robb, Lawrence Sanders, John Sandford, Lisa Scottoline, Alexander McCall Smith, Barbara Wilheim and Stuart Woods.

We have many more authors, those are just the ones I remember us having in great numbers.

Our Hardback Fiction section is on both sides of the hallway between the Donut shop and the Meeting Room. It's where you'll find general fiction, including spy fiction. We have a lot of Clancy, Coonts, Cussler, Grisham, Michener, Oates, Sheldon and many more. The books are rough-sorted at the moment, but we hope to have them completely sorted by author and title before the sale starts.

Good day for romance and sci-fi. Received a nice set of the JD Robb in death books - fun series but a little hard to classify since it is a futuristic, murder mystery with romance. Since she is Nora Roberts, we put them on the Nora Roberts table. Yes, she has her own table and usually sells out. She is the only one with her own table. The sci-fi was especially nice, cover with little edgewear, spines uncreased - not our normal batch of sci-fi. Sci -fi readers seem to read their books a little hard.
Also sent out 800 postcards for all of you who have signed up over the years to receive notification of our upcoming sale - you should get them in a few days.

We are making a list and checking it twice - actually making a list and having planning meetings about fastest, best ways of getting the sale ready. Hands on Portland is saying we are going to have lots of great help. One worry down.
The donations are being carted in - it is amazing how many great books are coming in. We spent the day pricing books and realized we had more when we left then when we came in in the morning. Linda likes order, so it is a little frustrating for her. My philosophy is the more the better - especially when the condition was as good as the ones coming in today.
More CDs were deleted today, we usually re case and polish them but we have run out of the new cases and are going with the library cases. If anyone knows where we can get some, please help. They still will get polished, if needed and we are pricing them at $1.50.

The the RTI CD polisher that we bought for the Library was well used today. Barbara, not me - different one, has been getting the CDs ready for the booksale. We recase and polish the ex- library and donated ones, if they need it. The library recases their new CDs into stronger cases and we get the new unwanted ones. Works out well for all of us. So, come to the sale and buy our mostly $2.00 great CDs.
Today, we also had an addition 3 boxes of interesting ex-library videos ready for the sale. The boxes are mounting up along with our anticipation.

Another big donation day. This week we also received more beautiful history books and as always, more childrens. We had a meeting to firm up our next sales, Fall 2010, Spring 2011, dates and the placement of books in this sale. After a bit of discussion, we decided to place Large Print ( we have more than last time), Western (does anyone read them anymore, we have a few boxes of them), and World Language and how to learn a language, in our upstairs hallway. There will be better signage this year, both up and down. I'm working on a map to hand out and of course, there will be our balloons. As before, our downstairs hallway leading to the sale will be Hard Back Fiction, along with the volunteers favorites bookcase. The other hallway - Videos, DVDs , LPs, CDs, and Audiobooks.

New stuff

It was a great day for donations - we received 6 boxes of great childrens book. We also had cart loads of withdrawn books wheeled into our room today. Lots of Childrens but also Westerns, Mystery and masses of Test Prep books (they usually start the sale under the Textbook area). Because we like to and we think they sell better - the childrens books get a nice wipe down before they make their way to the boxes. Only 31 days to our event.

I'm Barbara and have been having booksales at the library - 4 moves, for more than 30 years. I thought I would write about what goes on behind the scenes of a Friends Book Sale.
New signs have been ordered, our bookmarks made and tons of books have already been stored for our next big bookale. We start at 10:00am April 30th and end May 9th at 6pm.
Since we keep track of how many books of our different categories, we already know that we will have more childrens books than last time. Donations are always welcome and can be brought to the main Library, 2850 NE Brookwood Parkway, Hillsboro, OR. Volunteers are also always welcomed. Our big set-up on April 25th will be done with the Help of HandsonPortland.org. Check the Washington County calender. This is one great booksale and I hope to see you there.

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