WEST ORANGE, NJ — The Friends of the West Orange Public Library will be hosting its second Fall Book Sale on Saturday, Sept. 23, and Sunday, Sept. 24, with 10,000 books, CDs and DVDs on sale for prices between $0.50 and $3. All genres will be on sale in the lower level of the library on Mt. Pleasant Avenue, and the money from the sale will go to Friends of the Library for future projects. The book sale sold 4,000 books and raised approximately $4,600 between sales, 50/50 raffles, donations and Friends membership fees at last year’s inaugural event.
Some of the books and items for sale at this year’s event came from donations, but many are books from the library that haven’t been in circulation for an extended period of time.
“We’re required by law to spend a certain percentage of our budget (on books),” library Director Dave Cubie told the West Orange Chronicle in an in-person interview. “We are required to purchase so many volumes per person for the population. But if you remove books from the shelves pretty soon you wouldn’t be able to find them. It would get unmanageable and you wouldn’t be able to find stuff.”
The library staff searched their records to find out what has and hasn’t been checked out recently to determine what should be taken off the shelves and sold to make room for new inventory.
“We’re able to search our records of what has circulated and not circulated. Things that are removed are books that are just not being checked out by people,” Cubie said. “And they’re not considered in the core collection, so we’re not tossing out Shakespeare because no one read it last year.”
Friends Vice President Marge Mingin has been the primary organizer of this year’s book sale. A 25-year veteran of working in the South Orange-Maplewood School District as the director of media and technology, she is no stranger to working with libraries. Mingin and other members of the group have been at the library organizing the books that will be for sale this weekend so that buyers can find them easily. It’s an upgrade from last year, when the inventory was only organized by genre.
“We pulled every single book out and put them in alphabetical order,” Mingin told the Chronicle in a recent interview. “So the fiction is alphabetical by author. All of the Dewey numbers are in order. Last year it was broadly organized; you would really have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out if you wanted somebody’s biography. Now if you know who you’re looking for you’re going to find them.”
Before the sale kicks off at 10 a.m. on Saturday, the Friends of the Library will host a Friends members-only reception on Friday, Sept. 22, at the library. The group, which was launched in April 2016, hopes more members will join and get involved to help the library in addition to raising money.
“We started with that book sale to help clean out the space and raise funds,” Friends President Jerry Sweeney said in an in interview with the Chronicle. “This year, it’s going to be part of an ongoing regular activity. It took an enormous effort by the volunteers to sort through all of the books.”
The Friends of the Library organization has grown to approximately 150 members with an 11-member executive board since its inception. In the last year, they have worked to clean up the inside and outside of the library, worked with the West Orange Hispanic Heritage Foundation and West Orange African Heritage Organization to plan events, and began the Free Little Libraries — stations placed around town where residents can trade books.
Sweeney said that last year’s sale drew hundreds of customers — many of whom were complete newcomers.
“We certainly had hundreds of people, many of whom had never been to the library before,” he said. “So we view it as a way to raise funds and get people to come here.”
According to Mingin, many of those hundreds of customers were from West Orange, but not all of them.
“I talked to people from Newark, from Orange, from East Orange, from Bloomfield,” she said. “It’s interesting, because you think this is the West Orange book sale, but people come.”
Though the book sale is a fundraiser, the Friends of the Library’s true goal is to get as many people reading as they can.
“I don’t view it as trying to sell so many books,” Mingin said. “I just want to meet the needs of the people. I think the number that we want to see rise is the number of people who show up, that’s the most important thing. My goal this year is to really meet the people and say ‘What would you like to read? What are your needs?’ It’s going to be more of a visitor focus. That’s really our goal, to put the right book in the hands of the people that would enjoy them. I’d love to see a book in everybody’s hand.”
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