A week just before the Close friends of the Palo Alto Library (FOPAL) are owing to maintain their next reserve sale, volunteers at the group’s headquarters at Cubberley Local community Middle are sorting and arranging the contents of banker’s packing containers and library carts, stocking neatly labeled shelves with guides on journey, art, cooking, graphic novels, tomes on religion, politics, history and a big collection of fiction.
But in addition to books, FOPAL board associates Nigel Jones and Nancy Cohen have some abnormal merchandise to prep for sale: from a classic 1930s punchboard lottery recreation and a deck of Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot card to a 1748 French perform printed on handmade paper and a 1966 U.S. Congressional subcommittee report on “The Computer system and Invasion of Privacy.”
These goods are between the 300 parts of ephemera featured at the Friends’ specific Substantial Value Sale, which also capabilities books, CDs and DVDs, having position this weekend alongside the group’s normal regular sale at Cubberley. The particular sale, slated to acquire location outdoors last month, was postponed because of to weather conditions, and will now be held within.
The Substantial Value Sale will take area Saturday, Jan. 14, and the month to month sale starts off the similar day and operates via Sunday, Jan. 15.
The two income seem to illustrate two most important facets of FOPAL’s work.
“We are normally providing at about fifty percent what the on the internet price is. We’ve usually operated on a bargains-for-the community foundation,” Cohen reported of the typical regular monthly income.
“Nancy makes a good issue: we see ourselves in two distinctive ways,” Jones mentioned. “1 is that we gain the neighborhood specifically (with book income) and the other, of class, is that the library will come to us and claims, ‘We will need this total of money for this yr.’ That is our mission, to assistance the library.”
Alongside with searching by way of ephemera, customers at the High Value Sale will have their decision of about 1,500 publications that the team has valued increased than the usual choices at FOPAL’s month-to-month income, wherever rates in the primary home commence close to $2 to $3. Month-to-month sales also attribute a children’s space and a bargain area.
The offerings in the Significant Benefit Sale include textbooks on mother nature, house and garden, artwork books — specifically on Impressionism — history textbooks, these types of as on World Wars I and II. You will find also classic and modern-day fiction, which includes a two-volume set of “Wuthering Heights.”
“These are publications that are usually $20 to $30 and we’re likely to provide them all at $10. So the books are a single price,” Jones claimed of the Large Price Sale. “But the ephemera is challenging. So that’ll be priced as is. You will find likely to be hundreds and hundreds of illustrations of ephemera. It truly is a extremely unconventional area.”
Ephemera is an abnormal — and wide — class. A “tongue-in-cheek definition,” as Jones explained it, is “nearly anything that was made in paper that no person at any time believed would provide. So if grandma has been collecting tickets from every rock ‘n’ roll display that she’s ever been to, that is ephemera, or if you come throughout an album of a marriage ceremony … or an album of photos of the relatives, that is ephemera.”
The inventory for FOPAL sales, which includes for the Higher Worth Sale, arrives from community donations. On the early morning that this information business visited the Friends’ headquarters, a donor arrived at the door with a literal truckload of guides — a pickup mattress stacked to the brim. The day prior to, a donation of dozens upon dozens of jigsaw puzzles came in.
Sorting and valuing donations is amongst the lots of jobs for FOPAL’s approximately 450 volunteers, Jones mentioned, whose significant quantity enables them to get on specialized roles like his and Cohen’s perform in superior value items. Cohen also oversees the religion part. She claimed that the group utilizes web pages these types of as Bookfinder.com and eBay to exploration selling prices.
For the higher price group, which are items typically valued for resale at $20 and earlier mentioned, the group generally sells goods on the web by eBay and a 3rd bash who sells via Amazon on behalf of FOPAL. The on the net market offers a wider purchaser base and is possible to yield extra cash for the library, Jones and Cohen said.
Rare products predicted to fetch a significantly bigger cost are offered through FOPAL’s auction home husband or wife, PBA Galleries, with recent illustrations like an inscribed duplicate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s past ebook, “The place Do We Go From Below: Chaos or Community,” which marketed for $6,375 a signed initially version of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” comprehensive with address impregnated with asbestos, which marketed for $4,750 and a signed copy of “Panels for the Walls of Heaven” by Palo Alto painter and poet Kenneth Patchen, which went for $1,500.
The Mates hold in-man or woman, high benefit profits for the neighborhood each individual pair of years. The offerings count on what donations have come in, in some cases that includes a particular concentration, these kinds of as high-finish artwork books, or a additional standard sale, these as this a person, of books, media and ephemera.
The Good friends of the Palo Alto Library’s Large Worth Sale takes spot Jan. 14, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. and the monthly sale requires area Jan. 14 concerning 9:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. (hours range by space) and Jan. 15, all rooms open up 11 a.m.-4 p.m. at Cubberley Community Center, 4000 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. fopal.org.
