Tuesday night was preview night at the Springfield Greene County Library’s Friends of the Library book sale.
In the first ten minutes the Friends counted 659 customers parading into the E*Plex at the Ozark Empire Fairgrounds. Many toting boxes and pushing carts to fill to the brim. The preview night is open to members of the Friends organization every sale. It offers the first look at the bi-annual sale which runs through to the afternoon this Sunday, April 28.
Steve Long is president of the Friends of the Library. He said the organization has been running book sales to support the Springfield-Greene County Library for 39 years. He says the first sale was held in the Midtown-Carnegie Branch parking lot and made $2000. Last fall’s sale brought in over $190,000 dollars.
Long said the sale’s “reputation has spread to many many states wide.” He explained, “we sell more books every year for more dollars, so we keep growing.”
Long said the sales reputation attracts bookdealers from as far away as the Dallas-Fort Worth area and Des Moines. The sale also attracts people like Stephanie Grandestaff, librarian at Springfield Lutheran School. Grandestaff said the sale “is always a big blessing to our school because we can just find great books that are in good condition library quality books for pennies on the dollar, so it really helps our funds stretch a lot further.”
Long also says that people in southern Missouri and Ozarks are just readers, and they want books.
Danielle and Jason were two customers waiting in line for the doors to open. They say they appreciate the serendipity and variety the book sale provides.
Danielle said she was “very excited to look for authors I’ve never heard of,” she explained, “I’ve completed most of the collections that I’m always looking for so I’m not actually looking for anything in particular.” She had a strategy in mind, “today I’m going to start with games and DVDs, which I always save for the very end.”
Jason said, “For me it's just finding something new. It doesn’t matter if it's a series, novel, whatever it may be. I just want to try something new and try it.”
Since its inception the Friends of the Library have given over $5 million dollars to the Library District, funding events like Geezerfest and Symphony in the Stacks. They’ve also paid for equipment like the mobile library and the library express vending machines on the east and west side of Springfield and contributing to renovations. Long said they’ve recently pledged $300,000 toward a new auditorium planned at the Library Center.
Long said the Friends of the Library has about two-thousand members and relies on hundreds of volunteers to set up and carry out the sale. After 39 years of sales, he said they have it down to a science. Each item is touched almost a dozen times as it's assessed, sorted and boxed. During the sale volunteers wear color coded aprons so they know who to ask what. At the end of the week as many left over books as possible are donated to area non-profits and the few remaining get recycled.
Preview night is an exciting way to get things started, but Long said there are plenty of treasures to be found all week.
“There’s something for everyone,” Long said, “and that is not an overstatement. There are eight-track tapes, cassettes, vinyl; any book, any genre, any anything, we’ve got it.”
The sale runs through Sunday. Find details at thelibrary.org/friends