40th Annual Friends of the New Braunfels Public Library Book Sale

Friends of the Library 40th Annual Book Sale The preparation for Annual Friends of the Library (FOL) Book Sale begins many months prior to the sale, when members of the community donate their used books and other materials to the library. The library keeps some and the remainder are sent to the Friends’s building, located behind the main library building. Some of the books are sifted out to be sold in the FOL Bookstore, in the lobby of the New Braunfels Public Library. The rest of the thousands of books we receive during the year are then sorted and boxed by genre by the FOL volunteers who work in the sorting building year-round. When it is time for the FOL Book Sale, the hundreds of now sorted and labeled boxes of books are loaded into U-Haul trucks and delivered to the Main Exhibit Hall in Civic/Convention Center in downtown New Braunfels. Both FOL members and non-member volunteers from our community are involved in this massive moving day. Once there, boxes are opened and the books are distributed to tables that have been organized by genre. We provide a map during the sale to facilitate shopping in almost 12,000 square feet of books! Our prices can’t be beat! Adult hardback books are $2.00 each, paperbacks are $1.50. Children’s board books and hardback books are $1.00. Children’s paperbacks, record albums, CDs-Music, DVDs, and puzzles are $.50. Harlequin romance novels, magazines, and maps are $.25 each. We also have a special section on the stage of the Civic Center dedicated to copies of rare, special or collectible books that are priced individually. THIS IS A TAX-FREE EVENT! WE WILL EVEN HAVE STUDENT VOLUNTEERS FROM VARIOUS COMMUNITY AND SCHOOL ORGANIZATIONS ON HAND TO HELP YOU LOAD THE BOOKS IN YOUR CAR. Our book sale begins on Thursday, October 8, with our FOL Member Preview Sale, from 5:00 pm-7:30 pm, with no admission fee for members. If you are not currently a member, you may join by October 3 to take advantage of this special preview night. Nonmembers can come in for $25 a person. Admission is free on Friday and Saturday. On Friday morning doors are open from 9:00 am until 7:30 pm. Our final sale day is Saturday morning with doors open from 9:00 am until noon. We close for a brief intermission from noon to 1:00 pm, so the volunteers can get ready for the bag sale that runs from 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm. During the bag sale, customers can fill a provided bag with as many books as will fit in the bag (collectible books located on stage excluded); no limit on the number of bags purchased. After the sale has ended at 5:00 pm, educators and nonprofit groups are invited to come in and take any remaining books for free. All leftover books are picked up by an independent book seller who is contracted to clear them from the Civic Center at the conclusion of the sale. After the sale is done and the dust has cleared, we rest for a month and then we start taking donations for the next year’s book sale. The process starts all over for what we hope will be an even bigger sale the next year! This year the Friends of the Library are donating over $100,000 to the New Braunfels Public Library and the West Side Library and Community Center to financially support their programs that benefit all the people in our community. This amount was earned from our Annual Book Sale, our seasonal Children’s Book Sales and our Friends of the Library Bookstore. We are powered by our volunteers and supported by our community’s participation. We invite you to come to our sale and even better, join our organization!

Event Links

Facebook: https://go.evvnt.com/3763564-0

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