Jack Knox reveals little-known secrets of the Times Colonist Book Sale
Loretta Slavik was working at the sorting table the day the cat ashes were found. The ashes, in a tiny cremation urn with a pink ribbon, are the most famous of the weird ities to emerge from the boxes donated to the Times Colonist Book Sale over the past two decades. All sorts of stuff gets mixed up with the books, included by mistake.
Slavik was volunteering when the case of wine showed up, too. Unfortunately, the guy who inadvertently surrendered the plonk noticed it was missing, so we had to give it back.
Unlike the dentures. Slavik was surprised to fish a set of chompers out of a box one year. She was even more surprised when the owner didn’t come looking for them. “You would think you would have missed those.”
She got a bit of perverse satisfaction with another find: A $20 bill inside a book that was a gift from an aunt to a nephew. He had obviously never cracked the cover. Serves him right, the ungrateful wretch. “He deserved to not get the money.”
The twenty went into the pot with the rest of the money raised at the annual TC sale — a total of $2.3 million since 1998. Add in other sources, including $1.8 million in matching grants from the province, and the total hits $4.7 million, all of it going to literacy on Vancouver Island.
This weekend will see the 20th edition of the sale. The Times Colonist name might be on the event, but it only happens because of the volunteers who sort the books. About 100 of them were hard at it in the cavernous Victoria Curling Club on Monday, steadily creating order out of chaos, sifting through the massive volume of volumes — what, half a million of them? — that donors dropped off just over a week ago. (Only in Victoria would people wait patiently in a loooong line of cars for the privilege of giving away their books.) Why volunteer? Well, there’s the cause, of course. When working as a mental health nurse, Kathy Cropp sent patients to programs run by Project Literacy. As a foster mother, she enrolled kids with the READ Society. The two organizations are now under the umbrella of the Victoria Literacy Connection which got a $15,000 grant from the book sale this year. Cropp feels good about that.
Also, the sale is Word Nerd Nirvana. “It’s the book lovers’ social event of the year,” said ex-journalist, ex-coroner Barb McLintock, sorting in the Nature and Pets section.
Some people just adore the printed page. “I never had a TV until I was in my 40s,” said California-raised Lillian Kamper.
For some volunteers, the camaraderie is the attraction. “As soon as I came in today the girls said: ‘Where have you been,’ ” said Doreen Brunsdon, who missed the first week of sorting.
And then there are the Kinder Surprises — the cat ashes and dentures. Deborah David remembers a marijuana leaf perfectly preserved inside a Ken Kesey book, which seemed appropriate.
Nothing dramatic has emerged so far this year. A stained-glass penguin. Some adhesive eyebrows. Vases. A box of fabric and notions. A colouring book about sex with aliens (no, it didn’t go into the children’s section).
The usual assortment of photos, including one of the king and queen on their 1939 trip to Victoria, slipped out of book covers. (BTW, anyone know the people in the picture accompanying this column? And what’s that thing in front of the woman with the hat?)
More interesting are the books. Everything from the pig-oriented
Playboy parody Play boar (turns out it sold more than 300,000 copies), to an 1863 book titled Recollections of Old Liverpool, to the Canadian Legion Poppy Day Year Book of 1948, which included a Cowichan Valley veteran’s denunciation of cigarette taxes (“The milk of human kindness runs more freely in the veins of those whose blood carries a tinge of nicotine and alcohol in its make-up”).
Come to the sale this weekend. Treasures await.