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.