Volunteering at the Library

I helped set up the used book sale at one of our county libraries last Friday. It was different than last year because the room was in use until 5 PM so our set up was delayed until after that. In addition, it was raining all afternoon. I wondered if there were going to be a lot of wet boxes.

I got there about 10 minutes before the allotted time and there were indeed people in the room, so I worked on a jigsaw puzzle that the library had set up near a window while I waited. Other volunteers were arriving too – some with a load of book boxes in their cars (since it was raining – enclosed vehicles were required…the usual pickups could not be used).

After helping stack chairs and move tables to the periphery of the room, I got started on the children’s books like what I did last year. There was a table and a cart. The differences from last year were 1) more helpers and 2) less books (we estimated what we needed for the sale based on what happened last year). I had two helpers that loaded the bottom shelf of the cart, so I didn’t have any backache from this set up! We were done in less than an hour.

Volunteering Again

My first volunteering since moving to Missouri happened last weekend – helping set up a Friends of the Library in Christian County, Missouri book sale near where I live. I was part of the first wave of the set up so the first task was setting up the long folding tables around the edges and down the middle of the large space. There was one that seemed a little rickety and we quickly realized that it was not stable enough to load with books; it went back in the storage closet with a label that it was broken.

The boxes of donated books had been stored in a shed at the library and JROTC from the local high school loaded them onto a trailer and brought them over to our building. Fortunately the boxes were labeled well enough that we could aggregate them on the tables where the contents would be displayed. None of the volunteers with older backs (me included) had to lift any book boxes!

There were a large number of donated puzzles and I started emptying boxes and making a display that spread over two long tables. It seems that there were more puzzles than last year; maybe people are donating puzzles they bought during COVID. My goal was to get at least a small picture of the puzzle and the number pieces showing for each one. Most of the puzzles ended up in towers or standing on end.

It was a great way to spend a Saturday morning and I hope Friends of the Library make $$ from the sale that formally begins today.