20 things about the 20th book sale
This being the 20th annual Times Colonist Book Sale, here are 20 things to ponder while waiting in line Saturday.
1. You really don’t need to line up. There’ll be plenty of books left Sunday.
Still, some can’t wait: The first person in the queue last year arrived before midnight, more than nine hours before the sale began. He was saving the spot for his girlfriend so that she could sleep in.
2. How bad did that guy make the rest of us look by comparison?
3. Right, the nuts and bolts: The sale is this Saturday, May 6, and Sunday, May 7, at the Victoria Curling Club, 1952 Quadra St., from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days.
4. The book prices —$1, $2, or $3 — haven’t risen since 2002. If the TC were in charge, the average Greater Victoria single-family home would still sell for $280,000, as was the case 15 years ago. No 15 per cent foreign buyers tax at the TC sale.
5. Wear comfy shoes and prepare to be patient. This is a popular event. (If you have trouble with the patience part, we recommend our Self Help section.) The Good Fellows café in the curling club will be open if you get hungry.
6. The just-released 2016 census might show Greater Victoria with the lowest proportion of kids in the country (only 13.1 per cent under age 15), but there’s still an excellent children’s section (er, that’s excellent books; we don’t judge the quality of your children) upstairs. No strollers, please.
7. Given that the Victoria census region has far more seniors than children, do the former get their own section, too? Yes. THERE’S A LARGE-PRINT CATEGORY.
8. On Monday, May 8, teachers and representatives of non-profits may take away as many books as they like, for free, from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
9. After the teachers and nonprofits have taken what they want, any remaining books will be shipped to California by a company that buys them by the pound. The books are then sold online or donated to literacy groups and charities.
10. Among the titles donated this year: Kama Pootra — 52 Mind-Blowing Ways to Poop. How does this get published, yet Harry Potter’s J.K. Rowling got more rejections than you at a high school dance?
11. Most ironic find: A Tribute to the Martyred Leader of Non-Violence, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., written by murderous Haitian dictator Papa Doc Duvalier.
12. As reported Thursday, the mystery couple in a photo found in one of the books turned out to be Dick and Jeanette Jeanes at their 1948 wedding in Paris. Their son Dennis wrote from Toronto with some more info: The picture was taken in the Latin Quarter restaurant Polidor, and his mother was wearing a dress she made from parachute silk.
13. When dropping off his donations to this year’s book sale, Vancouver Island’s chief medical health officer, Dr. Richard Stanwick, rattled off stats on the link between literacy and health. “This project is a major but perhaps underappreciated contributor to the health of the region,” he says.
14. Saturday is World Naked Gardening Day. It is not World Naked Shopping for Gardening Books Day. Just saying.
15. One couple donated 60 cartons of cookbooks this year. Happily, no one donated a copy of the bug and worm cookbook that showed up last year, though. Marsha Birney, who volunteers sorting that section of the sale, thought it odd when the latter appeared. She thought it even odder when it sold.
16. There are treasures to be found. Last year someone bought an atlas for $3, then returned with a $100 donation after discovering how valuable it was.
17. Not everyone is so altruistic. We once had an octogenarian shoplifter whose trench coat was so laden with stolen books that he could barely move. We had to give him a little nudge to help him out the door.
18. The first sale was in 1998, the newspaper’s response to reporter Susan Danard’s stories on funding cuts to school libraries.
Organizers had no idea how many books would be donated. “We can store them in my office,” the editor suggested beforehand. His office was 120 square feet.
19. That sale brought in $20,800. This year, 160 recipients, most of them schools, got TC Book Sale grants totalling close to $272,000.
20. The running tally from the first 19 sales is $2.3 million, which — along with some other contributions — triggered $1.8 million in matching funds from the provincial government, bringing the total to $4.7 million. All of it goes to literacy on Vancouver Island.
That’s thanks to the volunteers, sponsors and those who lined up to donate and buy books. Good for you.