Westport (MA) Friends Meeting House Book Sale
July 8, 2006
Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.
It was a few minutes before 11 a.m. but to book lovers it was the ”high noon” of the bargain book season. As the seconds ticked toward the top of the hour, hundreds of bookslingers stood in the sun, eyeing thousands of hardcover and paperback books stacked on tables under two huge yellow and white tents set up in front of the Friends Meeting House on Main Road. At precisely 11 a.m., a whistle sounded and the crowd surged forward with measured determination, intent on carving several more notches on their book lists. The annual Book Sale at the Friends Meeting House was underway.
Armed with canvas bags and cardboard boxes, it seemed, as one participant said. “like a swarm of locusts had descended on the place.” It was not a good day to be claustrophobic. Shoulder to shoulder, fanny to fanny, they milled through the narrow spaces between book-laden tables with surprising patience. If the shopper beside you picked a book you had your eye on, another good choice would likely appear within arm’s reach.
Shopping styles varied. The confident zeroed in, grabbed a book and kept on trucking. The tentative lifted one out of the rows of neatly stacked books and held it indecisively, making a mental roll of the dice to decide whether to drop or drag.
Some consumers filled cartons, slipped outside the tent to deposit them under a tree, grabbed another carton, and dove back into one of the tents.
“Did you read this one?” Advice and recommendations, unsolicited or requested, flew about between readers in their twenties and those old enough to qualify as their grandparents. As the first hour’s frenzy calmed, scores of purchasers sat in the grass, sorting their treasures and eating taboulie and hot dogs or rewarding themselves with the home made brownies and peanut butter cookies on sale in the refreshment area.
“We’ll do 80%of our business this weekend,” Dartmouth Meeting member Kevin Lee said, as he cheerfully waded through the crowd distributing what he hawked as “designer bags”, which looked an awful lot like plastic and paper shopping bags, to people with armloads of books. By the time the dust settled after the two-week sale, he estimated five to six thousand people would haul away about 20,000 books.
The book sale has become the Westport Friends’ major fund-raiser. “It helps fund our various ministries for the homeless, peace missions, soup kitchens violence prevention programs and other initiatives of the American Friends Service Committees,” Mr. Lee, who has eighteen years of experience with the event, said.
“We’ve built shelves in one of the buildings behind the meeting house. Books are dropped off all year round and volunteers sort them twice a week all through the winter,” Mr. Lee explained.
Occasionally a book is like a box of crackerjacks and includes a surprise tucked inside the pages. “We’ve found five dollar bills, pressed flowers, recipes from grandma as we’ve sorted. We just leave them in the books,” Mr. Lee said.
Over the next two weeks, the mountain of books will diminish in size and remain under one of the tents. Browsers will amble in. If they purchase, they’ll find the price written inside the book and drop their money inside a coffee can. “Some books get recirculated so often year after year that we started marking the prices in pencil,” Mr. Lee said.
And some books get reread several times. “That’s the advantage of old age, you end up reading books you read long ago, forgot what they were about, and enjoy reading them all over again,” one veteran shopper was overheard saying to a fellow book lover.
With sentiments like this, it’s clear that the Friends Meeting House annual book sale will never run out of customers or titles.
Book categories of hardcover and paperback books
History, Science Fiction, Mystery, Novels. Literature, Religion, Philosophy, Sociology, Art, Photography, Gardening, Hobbies, Crafts Music, Boating, Cooking, Travel, Foreign Languages, Sports, Biography, Coffee Table Books, Children’s Books
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