Book sale happening at Humboldt County Library

At the Friends of the Redwoods Libraries book sale at the Humboldt County Library, you have 30,000 titles to choose from, and you only have to pay $2 for a grocery sized bag full of books. 

“We rely on people to donate books. That’s where we get them. And then we turn around and sell them at a good price. And we don’t want to refuse books. And things go in cycles. I think Covid has something to do with it because we were closed for two years. And so there’s a backlog of people wanting to clean out their houses”, says William Cech, coordinator with Friends of the Redwoods. 

The books accumulate all year from donations, and Friends of the Redwoods Libraries helps ensure the books stay circulating. 

“And there are some, you know, estate sale kind of things where people have to get rid of dad and moms stuff. And so it goes in a cycle. And it’s been really, really good the past three years, to the point where we just can’t sell them as fast as we get them, and we kind of feel it’s our mission to, well, our mission is to support the library”, he said. 

“But there’s also a mission about sustainable living. And reusing a book saves an incredible amount of carbon footprint because making books is really wasteful of water, energy. And so what we try to do is get them back out in other people’s hands. And we charge $0.50 for a paperback and a dollar for a hardcover. So there’s not a lot of cost and it encourages people to read, encourages people to be involved in the library because we are out of the library. So that’s kind of what we do”, says Cech.  

If you sign up for friends of the Redwoods Libraries for only $5 you can get first access to the quarterly sale. 

“We don’t pre-pack them. You pick the books. We started the day with somewhere around 30,000. That’s not written in stone because I estimated we don’t really have a system to know exactly what comes in and what goes out, but I’m pretty sure it is in that range”, he says.

If you’re interested in donating to the library you can find more information here:

Book Sales

Story by Tucker Caraway