Confessions of a Book Sale Junkie

My family has been aware of my addiction for some time now, although I don’t think some of my grown children  realized how out of control it had become until they visited me in Virginia and saw the thousands of
books that now line my walls downstairs in the basement.  Our bookshelves have always been the focal point of our decor.  Whenever we moved...and we moved a lot...it never felt like home until the books were back on the shelves.

We had a respectably sized collection...until I discovered the Friends of the Library book sale.  That’s when I lost control.  And here on the East Coast, I’m not limited to THE annual book sale at one local library.  Oh no. I can find one just about every weekend.

My poor husband comes with me–a somewhat willing partner in crime-- as I pass off book bag after book bag loaded with books he gets to lug to the car.  How can I leave behind a 1912 set of a Young Folks’ Treasury when they’re 25 cents a book?  It doesn’t matter that I have ten other equally valuable sets I’ve rescued.

Rescued.

That’s why this has become such a problem.  I see a culture vanishing before my eyes and I’ve become a one-woman crusade to rescue it; a culture of refinement and decency and faith and family and love of liberty.  I know I’m probably chasing windmills, but I can’t help myself.  I don’t see the replacement culture  as a good thing.  If the pattern of history continues to repeat itself, the direction we’re heading doesn’t end well for us.

Several decades ago, two men wrote two books with visions of the future.  In Brave New World, people quit reading because they no longer cared about reading.  In 1984, people quit reading because the books were destroyed.   Today, in 2013, we are seeing both visions playing out.
IKEA has announced discontinuing the sale of book shelves because they’re not in demand any more. In the future they will have a narrower design so they can be used to display knick-knacks.  A school district in Utah threw away all their Charles Dickens books because the sentences were too long and the words were too hard for the students to understand.

But that’s not the worst of it.  I have been heartsick to read of book murderers out there.  Just a warning  if you continue to read...if you are a fellow book lover, you’ll be horrified by these shocking true accounts.

Back in August of 2008, following the scare when lead was found in toys shipped from China, Congress hastily passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act requiring that anyone who sold items for use by children under the age of 12 would need to have certification that the product was lead free. Included in the list of suspect products were children’s books printed before 1985 because they claimed there was lead in the printer’s ink before that time.  Even though a child would have to literally consume the entire book and there has never been a single case of that ever happening, and even though Congress was petitioned to exclude books from the law, the law went into effect February 1, 2009.  By the way, the cost of testing a single book runs between $300 to $600.  At the last minute, the penalty was increased from $5000 per incident violation to $100,000 per incident and potential imprisonment.

Needless to say, thrift store owners couldn’t take the risk.  And on that February 1st, reports like this came in from all over the country:

“I just came back from my local thrift store with tears in my eyes! I watched as boxes and boxes of children’s books were thrown in the garbage.  Every book they had on the shelves prior to 1985 was destroyed!”

Fortunately, three years later Congress finally exempted books from the Act, but you can’t bring back what’s already been destroyed.  Books published after 1923 are in copyright protection, which means many of these old books likely won’t see the light of day in our lifetime.  Publishers who hold the copyrights  aren’t interested in re-publishing books for a market that apparently doesn’t exist anymore.

And as if that isn’t horrifying enough, I was checking into Amazon’s new bookseller program.  (The agreement with my family is that I can keep my book fix if I sell at least as many books as I keep.)  For a small shipping fee, I can ship books I want to sell to a giant Amazon warehouse where they’ll store them, box them and ship them for me for just a small fee.  It sounded like a good deal until I got to the part where I read about what happens to the books that don’t sell.  If I get to the point I no longer want to pay the storage fee, they’ll ship them back to me for $3.00 a book.  Let me rephrase that.  THREE DOLLARS A BOOK. OR they’ll destroy them for 50 cents a book.  That’s the word they use.  DESTROY.

Suddenly I’m picturing book scavengers like myself snatching up the old children’s books, sending them off to an Amazon warehouse, and, not realizing their actual value is what’s written inside, will opt for the DESTROY option when they don’t sell.  And by so doing, will not only kill the books, but kill our culture as well.

So, yes, on the outside I’m an out-of-control book sale junkie.  But really, I’m  on a crusade.  My kids ask me what I’m going to do with all those old, dusty books downstairs.  I tell them I’m not sure.  But inside my heart,  I envision a young girl in some future day who looks just like a girl  I read about in a book. The book was a true story written by a young Chinese woman who lived through Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution; a time when culture was changed by destroying books.  She was one of the lucky few assigned to learn English and it just so happened a small collection of books had escaped destruction because they were written in English and were hidden away in a library attic.  I’ll let this young Chinese woman speak for herself:

“Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women was the first novel I read in English. ...My joy at the sensation of my mind opening up and expanding was way beyond description.

Being alone in the library was heaven for me.  My heart would leap as I approached it, usually at dusk, anticipating the pleasure of solitude with my books, the outside world ceasing to exist.  As I hurried up the flight of stairs . . . the smell of old books long stored in airless rooms would give me tremors of excitement, and I would hate the stairs for being too long.

 . . . I became acquainted with Longfellow, Walt Whitman, and American history.  I memorized the whole of the Declaration of Independence, and my heart swelled at the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and those about men’s “unalienable Rights,” among them “Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  These concepts were unheard of in China, and opened up a marvelous new world for me.  My notebooks . . . were full of passages like these, passionately and tearfully copied out.”*

Book junkie by day.  Caped  crusader by night.

I can live with that.


*(The book is Wild Swans by Jung Chang.  Highly recommended.)