Friends Spring Used Book Sale

Schedule
The sale will begin with a Members Only Pre-Sale, Wednesday evening, May 13 from 5:30 to 7:30. Only current Friends of the Forest Grove Library members will be admitted. Memberships may be acquired or renewed at the door.
The general admission sale is scheduled for Thursday, May 14 through Saturday, May 16. Hours correspond with the Library’s open hours: Thursday 9:30–7:30, Friday and Saturday 9:30–5:30. Over 8,000 books and other media will be on sale.

Prices
Hardback books are $3, mass market paperbacks (4″ wide) $1, other paperbound books $2, children’s books and coffee table books are priced as marked, CDs, LPs and audio books are $1 and multi-title media sets are $3.

Members Discount
On Friday, May 15, current members of Friends of the Forest Grove Library get a 20% discount on their purchases. Memberships can be started or renewed at the book sale. Dues remain the same: $10 Individual / $20 Family / $35 Contributing / $100 Sustaining. Members receive twice-a-year newsletters announcing book sales and the Friends annual meeting.

Bag Sale
On Saturday, May 16, all shoppers can fill standard brown paper grocery bags with books and other media and pay just $10 per bag full.

You can help
Volunteers make the sale possible. We need and appreciate your help with set-up (Monday, May 11 to Wednesday, May 13), the sale itself (Thursday, the 14th to Saturday, the 16th) and to clean-up (the morning of Monday, May 18). Please contact Katie Allnutt at allnutt@frontier.com to schedule your preferred job and time slot. Volunteers get two free books of their choice for each shift.

Dealer alert: Friends volunteers have screened book donations and library discards and removed some of them for sale online.

What happens to the books you donate?

Books and other materials donated to the Forest Grove City Library are first reviewed by Library Staff to see if they should be added to the Library’s inventory.

For those that are not selected, and for books de-selected from the Library collection by staff, Friends of the Library volunteers check used book prices online to pick out those that are valued at $8 or more. Most of them will be put on sale at Amazon.com under Friends’ dealership name, “forestgrovelibraryfriends.”  Friends have more than 2600 books on sale through Amazon and these online sales will net more than $8,000 for the Library during the Friends fiscal year.

Books in good condition that are not selected for online sales are sorted by Friends volunteers for the twice-a-year book sales and for ongoing sales in the library. The twice-a-year sales are Friends’ primary income source.  They have been making about $10,000 a year.  The ongoing in-library sales are a new Friends project.

Making money for the Library is one of Friends’ top priorities but this process for library donations and discards has other benefits: (1) Between donations and discards, the library has around 12,000 books to dispose of every six months, (2) turning donations away would be bad for the Library’s public relations, (3) friends efforts make money for library programs and help recirculate these books in our own community.

Friends used book sale goes online

In addition to Friends’ twice yearly book sales at the Library, we have begun selling donated books online.  Friends has become one of the many organizations selling through Amazon.  We list books in Amazon’s huge database and have the advantage of participating in that gigantic marketplace.  So far 80 books have been listed and 11 sold at an average sales price of over $24.  
If you would like to see all the books we have for sale online, go to Amazon, choose the book catagory for your search and enter forestgrovelibraryfriends in the search box.
We need more books!  The books you donate to the Forest Grove City Library are (1) considered for addition to the Library, (2) checked for prices online–those with low prices over $10 are usually added to our Amazon listings–or, (3) the books are sold at our twice a year sale.
Please give us your unwanted books!  Just drop them off at the Library or call the Library 503-992-3247  to arrange to have them picked up by Friends volunteers.
Every cent Friends makes goes toward your Forest Grove community library!