Committee Reports
2006 INULA BOOK SALE REPORT
The 2006 InULA Book Sale raised a total profit of $7,268.44. Sherri Michaels (of the Wells Library) and Liz Goldberg (of the Law Library) co-chaired the Book Sale Committee this year. Close to fifty people (48), most of them professional book dealers, paid the $20 entrance fee for the Preview Sale. This figure is down a bit from the previous year, when sixty people paid to get into the Preview Sale.
The Sale could not have taken place without the generosity of the donors and the hard work of the many volunteers who collected and sorted the books, carted them down to E174 from the 11th floor, set up for the sale, worked at the sale (selling tickets to the Preview Sale, totaling purchases, taking money, making change, and answering questions), and cleaned up afterwards.
Special thanks are due to David Frasier (of the Wells Library) for the enormous amount of work he's done over the years for the Book Sale. Each year, David has been the person to whom book donations are sent. David receives these donated books, transports them to the 11th floor, and spends a lot of time sorting them during the weeks before the Sale.
Special thanks are also due to Bob Noel (of the Swain Hall Library), who assisted Sherri in traveling around the campus and community to pick up book donations and bring them to Wells. Sherri and I would also like to recognize the great work of the rest of the 2006 Book Sale Committee: Gary Charbonneau, Kate Cruikshank, Erika Dowell, Elizabeth Hanson, Kathryn Marlett, and Saundra Taylor.
While the hard work of David, Bob, and the other volunteers was "business as usual" for the Book Sale, the co-chairs did institute some changes this year. One change was a lottery to determine the order in which people could enter the Preview Sale. We sold entrance tickets for $20 apiece and gave each purchaser half of a two-part, numbered ticket. The other half of each ticket went into a box, and once all the tickets were sold, we drew numbers from the box. The ticket-holders lined up in the order that their numbers were drawn. This made for a much calmer, more orderly start to the Preview Sale. The book dealers appreciated the change, as did the volunteers running the Sale.
Another change the co-chairs experimented with this year was a bid on the Sale's remainders. We figured that somebody might want the leftover books for $20 or so, but nobody made a bid of any size. One book dealer told Sherri that "one dollar would have been too much" to pay for the remainders. For next year's Sale, we think it might be a good idea to extend the Sunday sale until 6:00 p.m. and make the books free (yes, completely free!) between 5:00 and 6:00. This should help cut down on the number of books that we are left with.
This year, we gave two boxes full of leftover books to the Monroe County Public Library and five boxes to the Red Cross book sale. In addition, Andrea Morrison took some books for the St. Charles book sale. The rest went to the gentleman who hoards them in a barn.
Not everything went according to plan this year. We had decided to hold the Sale in a different, larger location this year. After quite a bit of research, we settled on the Willkie Auditorium. The space is large, there's an exit door to a driveway (making it easy for purchasers of large numbers of books to get them to their vehicle), and the Willkie folks were not going to charge us anything to use the space. We thought we had booked the auditorium for the weekend of April 8th and 9th, but there was some miscommunication, and they put us down for the following weekend, which turned out to be Easter. We had to scramble madly for another location, had no luck finding one, and ended up back in Wells E174. Even worse, E174 had been reserved until fairly late in the evening on Friday, which made setting up for the Sale a challenging, late-night affair.
During the Sale itself, we did hear fewer complaints than in the past few years, although a few dealers (especially the ladies from Bookmarkt) still complained about the size of the room. At least we did not hear many (any?) complaints about the selection of books this year.
One book dealer made a stink because he had selected a big pile of books, put some personal items on top of the pile, and wandered off to look for more books, thinking that his personal items would keep others from taking the books he'd selected. Well, after finding that someone had taken his pile of books and tossed his personal items aside, he was furious and demanded his $20 back. I sympathized with him but didn't feel that the "theft" was really our fault, so I offered a compromise, a refund of half the entrance fee (i.e., $10). He seemed satisfied with that. Otherwise, things went pretty smoothly.