Not your average sale.
As usual, people will line up outside the Friends of the Library warehouse on North Main Street Friday night, the night before the five-day sale begins, to have first dibs.
It's been that way year after year. The line wraps out the door and down to the street to enter the “biggest sale in the Southeast,” which is what volunteer Jim Dahlman calls the 60th annual Friends of the Library Fall Sale, which runs Saturday through Wednesday.
This sale is not for cars, clothes, or expensive luxury items. It's for books. It's for puzzles, games, CDs, records, comic books, tapes, artwork, computer software, DVDs and videotapes, too. But primarily, it's for books.
Book prices typically range from 25 cents to $4. Expensive items can be found in the “Collector's Corner” and have been price-matched online to make sure the prices are in line with the going price.
The warehouse located on 430 N. Main St. is managed solely by volunteers. All the proceeds go back into the community to promote reading and to support the Alachua County Library District.
Each sale -- there's one every spring and one every fall -- raises around $140,000 to $150,000, according to co-chairman of the book sale Bill Watson. In the 60 years since the first sale, the organization has raised about $5 million.
It takes a lot of hours to put together a successful event, Watson said. Preparation begins six months in advance. Over 140 volunteers arrange, sort and price the items.
Donations are accepted throughout the year. There is an estimated 500,000 items that will be available for purchase, according to Watson.
“The money made during the book sale is used for budgeted library support, scholarship for library staff, special projects and county literacy projects,” according to the Friends of the Library website, folacld.org.
Profits from the sale provide funding for mini-grants to charitable organizations in the community to establish quiet reading rooms. They allow the library to purchase bookmobiles, as well as to purchase land to build a reading center.
The organization has helped Peaceful Paths, along with many other agencies, giving about $1,000 to $2,000 to each to make various improvements to benefit literacy.
The Friends of the Library is “purely nonprofit, so all the money goes to efforts to help the library,” Dahlman explained. “The only person that gets paid is the janitor.”
Most of the volunteers are retired Gainesville residents who are passionate about books.
Dahlman is a retiree who came to the sale 13 years ago to donate some of his books. He did not realize he was going to walk into something that would become one of his greatest passions.
He asked one of the volunteers if they needed any more help and they did. He has been a volunteer ever since.
Volunteers work long hours to prepare for the October and April sales each year. They work in the “heat of July and August, and wear gloves around January and February because it's so cold,” Dahlman said.
Even though it's a lot of work to prepare for the event, Dahlman says the Friends of the Library has “meant a meaningful retirement for him.”
Quite often there are hidden gems in a box of old books.
“There was recently a book we found that was worth $1,500,” Dahlman said. “We are a charity, and we want to sell it to the community, so we sell it for a third of its actual value. In this case, we sold the book for $500.”