Charity book sale!

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Added 16th November 2013: Grand Charity Book Sale, 10.00am-3.00pm Thursday 21st, Friday 22nd and Saturday 23rd November at the Stella Maris Hall, Gordon Road, Lowestoft, in support of the new East Coast Hospice.

Original post 28th October 2013: As a bookseller I buy books, mainly locally, and sell them all over the world via internet. I specialise in local history and in naval and miltary history but I am often asked to view collections outside these genres.

A few weeks ago I took a call from someone who wanted a house cleared of books. The house had been sold, they did not live locally and the need to provide vacant possession of the premises was imminent. The brief description that I was given did not really match with the genres already described but although I am usually pretty strict with what I buy there was something about this call that made me want to help. The location was only a few miles away, there was a local keyholder and so I made arrangements to view them a couple of days later.

I think the original purchaser of the books may have been suffering from some form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. The collection seemed to include every Reader’s Digest publication and/or part-work, every BBC publication, every celebrity biography, etc. published since about 1980, as well as numerous books on wildlife, countryside, health, well-being, all religions, philosophy, Darwin, Bertrand Russell, Bernard Shaw, etc. and every form of heavy-weight reference work imaginable. All were virtually mint apart from slight signs of aging and some had accumulated a little dust and fluff. There was very little in my field but from what the vendor had said the only other option for disposal was to ‘skip’ the lot and being a bibliophile that idea horrified me.

I didn’t really want to buy many of them but viewing had coincided with a discussion about fund-raising with a group with which I am involved at church. Serendipity, I thought, let’s see if we can raise some money for charity at a sale in the church hall and the seller will at least have them cleared from the house and save the cost of hiring another skip. With help from those same colleagues, a number of man-hours and several trailer loads later we had moved them all to my home where the next task has been to sort and dust them, repack them into more durable boxes and then remove them once more, this time to the church hall.

From a mixed accumulation of books we now have boxes of biographies, of books on wildlife and sport, reference books, etc., so that we can easily pick out a box of a particular genre to display for sale. We plan to have a Grand Charity Book Sale in mid-November, in time to catch the eye of the Christmas shoppers and in support of the new East Coast Hospice. I have not counted them all but I would say that there are probably over 1200 books, all originally priced between about £5 and £90. The asking price this time round, with a few exceptions, will be 50p for books originally priced up to £10, £1 for books between £10 and £20 and £2 for books originally priced above that.

If you live in the Lowestoft area then keep an eye out for a Grand Charity Book Sale mid-November in Gordon Road – I hope to see you there!