The South Central Regional Library’s big book sale will be back this year with an opportunity having arisen for the South Central Regional Library.
The library had been considering what to do as far as a book sale goes, and the plans then fell into place when the Morden Fire Department decided it no longer wanted to do its own sale in support of the Children’s Hospital in Winnipeg.
“They were doing their big book sale in spring, and they helped us set up a larger book sale at one of the churches here in Morden,” said Morden branch administrator Gail Hildebrand, recalling that library volunteers helped with the department’s sale last year. “At the end of that book sale, they decided the fire department was done with it. They didn’t want to do the book sale anymore, so they asked us if we wanted to take it over from them.”
“What we heard a lot last year was people saw us in our red aprons with South Central on there and everyone wondered is this the [library’s] sale?” said director of library services Cathy Ching. “Gail and I talked during the sale and we decided we can do this if we plan long enough ahead.”
The last large-scale SCRL book sale was held in 2019. It then had to be on hold during the pandemic, though a couple other factors came into play when organizers were deciding whether to bring it back in recent years.
“A lot of our volunteers have aged out or just moved on … it was a lot of years between book sales, so we lost the volunteer base that we had,” Ching said. “We also didn’t have access to the Access Event Centre because it was a COVID immunization site.”
The library then moved to having each branch library do its own smaller sale for a few years.
“We decided to try something different, and it was met very well by the communities,” Ching said. “A lot of those smaller communities were excited to have their own book sales.”
“We thought we were done until this opportunity came up and dropped into our laps,” noted Hildebrand. “People have missed the big sale in general … for 44 years, having this big book sale in spring became an event that a lot of people looked forward to and relied on to get their summer reading stocked up.”
Ching said they are aiming to set it up in a similar way to past sales again, but a new aspect is the mountain of books that will be coming from the Children’s Hospital book sale in Winnipeg.
“It’s going to be a lot of work because the books are just going to come out of the boxes from Winnipeg … we’re going to spend a day putting them on tables and trying to sort them into the categories,” she said.
“We’re hoping people will enjoy this again,” Ching added. “Some people are browsers, and some people have limited time, and they just want to head straight to the children’s books or the inspirational.
“It’s not going to be perfect because we will have had very little time [between the books arriving in town from Winnipeg and the sale weekend] … and we have no idea what will be sitting on the truck.”
“We don’t have the same kind of storage we used to … we used to store them in the Access Event Centre, and everywhere is full to the rafters,” said Hildebrand, who noted a patron a number of years ago donated a trailer so that used book donations collected from patrons throughout the year could be stored off-site.
To help simplify things for the sale, there won’t be any per-book pricing done.
“We’re doing a $10 bag sale right from the start. We learned from the fire department that that was the way to go,” Ching said. “We saved ourselves a ton of time with no pricing of the books. It’s going to be much simpler.”
Hildebrand said they do look forward to the sale, although it makes for a few long days for library staff and volunteers.
“It’s a lot of work. It’s a little daunting,” she said. “It is a lot of fun to do them. In the moment, it is exhausting.”
Ching noted the best book sale ever brought in close to $21,000, so it provides a big boost to the library network.
“We are also planning ahead to our 60th anniversary next year,” she said. “So we’re going to put some money away to put towards our pet project next year, which may be a book bus.
“We always need volunteers,” Ching added. “We’ve got classes coming to help us unload the boxes and cut down the boxes.”
The sale runs Thursday, May 2 from 5-9 p.m., Friday, May 3 from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Saturday, May 4 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Access Event Centre in Morden.
