A couple side-by-sides I set up at the thrift store this week:
I love vintage books like these old cookbooks and I'm surprised they don't fly off the shelf, but they don't. I'm going to experiment with putting them online.
We got a batch of these 1960s Signet Classics Shakespeares with fantastic covers by Milton Glaser, in pristine shape. I haven't put them out yet. They don't sell for much online--I suppose a million were printed.
Last weekend I went to a book sale at the small branch library one block away (!). I got there just before closing, unintentionally arriving in time for the $5/grocery-bag sale.
Here are some of the 34 books I got in one bag to donate to my BOOK's store--about 15 cents per book.
Good decent stock––not much spectacular, except for the typeface of Bread Rolls & Sweet Doughs (a book for commercial bakeries with recipes that call for 15 pounds of flour),
and some cool covers on old sci-fi paperbacks. A certain group of customers loves those (as do I).
Yesterday I went to our warehouse, which houses the food bank; large incoming donations (like leftovers from library book sales, which is what I was there to sort); and unsaleable stuff that's getting recycled---we have an industrial baler that squashes clothes into tightly packed cubes.
[Was I unclear in an earlier post about being annoyed at a customer who took her husband's worn trousers to a homeless shelter?
It IS good to donate unwearable clothes to thrift stores--mark the bag "cloth for recycling". The stores don't make much money selling rejects to recyclers, but it keeps textiles out of the waste stream.
Homeless shelters don't have that capacity.]
Out of fifty boxes of library-sale leftovers, I culled five boxes of books for the store. Mostly the boxes were full of worn-out mysteries and children's books, and old hardcover bestsellers nobody buys.
The remaining forty-five boxes will be sold to recycling, making barely enough to cover handling costs.
I don't know why we do pick-ups like these. Leftovers are going to be stripped of the good stuff. I'd say let the library sell them to recyclers themselves.
We got a batch of these 1960s Signet Classics Shakespeares with fantastic covers by Milton Glaser, in pristine shape. I haven't put them out yet. They don't sell for much online--I suppose a million were printed.
Last weekend I went to a book sale at the small branch library one block away (!). I got there just before closing, unintentionally arriving in time for the $5/grocery-bag sale.
Here are some of the 34 books I got in one bag to donate to my BOOK's store--about 15 cents per book.
Good decent stock––not much spectacular, except for the typeface of Bread Rolls & Sweet Doughs (a book for commercial bakeries with recipes that call for 15 pounds of flour),
and some cool covers on old sci-fi paperbacks. A certain group of customers loves those (as do I).
[Was I unclear in an earlier post about being annoyed at a customer who took her husband's worn trousers to a homeless shelter?
It IS good to donate unwearable clothes to thrift stores--mark the bag "cloth for recycling". The stores don't make much money selling rejects to recyclers, but it keeps textiles out of the waste stream.
Homeless shelters don't have that capacity.]
Out of fifty boxes of library-sale leftovers, I culled five boxes of books for the store. Mostly the boxes were full of worn-out mysteries and children's books, and old hardcover bestsellers nobody buys.
The remaining forty-five boxes will be sold to recycling, making barely enough to cover handling costs.
I don't know why we do pick-ups like these. Leftovers are going to be stripped of the good stuff. I'd say let the library sell them to recyclers themselves.
I remember those Shakespeare covers.
ReplyDeleteWell, at least you got five boxes out of the library-sale lot. Maybe you'll make a little bit from those books.
ReplyDeleteI love the "Flying Eyes" cover! I bet that's a really terrible book but I'd read it. :)
For some reason old cookbooks never seem to sell well. Maybe it's because styles of cooking change? (I'm basing this on the fact that used-book sales I go to always seem overstocked with old cookbooks.)