VILLAGE OF FAYETTEVILLE – The Fayetteville Free Library will be holding its first basement book sale of the year from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday, May 20.
As the name of the event suggests, the blowout sale will take place in the Orchard Street library’s downstairs section accessible by elevator or the side door.
The library held its most recent basement sale on Aug. 13 with a decade-in-the-making sale of vintage specialty treasures in between on March 26. Since that summer sale was the library’s first event of the sort since 2019 due to its COVID-related pause, Assistant Director Leah Kraus said she looks forward to keeping up the momentum and unveiling a “big influx of new material” this weekend.
Ahead of the event and all year round, the library accepts like-new books and other items that need a new home from the surrounding community. People planning to shop can also drop off items the day of the sale.
Anyone who contributes to the inventory can receive a donation slip and use it as a tax write-off, Kraus said. She said the library will accept “pretty much anything” that isn’t moldy, smoky, overly stained or falling apart.
The book sales are put on by the library’s team of volunteers, a group also in charge of categorizing everything brought in by genre.
“They’re down here all the time working on it, like on weekends, nights, whenever they’re free outside of their day jobs, so it’s a real community effort and we couldn’t do it without them,” Kraus said. “I think people who’ve never been are always really surprised to see the scope of it and the scale of it and that it’s like a whole second library in the basement. They expect to be digging through boxes of books, and this is just really well-inventoried and organized.”
The springtime selection is set to include a science fiction collection, general history literature, mystery novels and cookbooks as well as puzzles, games, DVDs, CDs and more. Most of the items are lowered to somewhere between 50 cents and $2 to motivate customers to buy in bulk.
Kraus said each sale counts as a sustainability effort too.
“This is a great example of reuse and resource sharing as the library is generally,” she said. “Instead of putting your books in the trash, bring them to us because it’s good for the environment that we get more life out of them and people enjoy them.”
The books that go unsold often get stocked in Little Free Libraries around Fayetteville, shared with senior living facilities, or passed along for literacy initiatives led by high school students.
Serving as the library’s biggest recurring source of fundraising, the basement book sales are being kept to twice a year, with the next one falling on Nov. 4. Kraus said that was the “sweet spot” between being infrequent enough to be special and anticipated and frequent enough to continue the cycle of getting books back out into the community.
The library also maintains a browsable boutique on its upper floor with books available for purchase any day.
For the upcoming sale, shoppers are encouraged to bring their own boxes or bags to carry their discoveries and keep track of how many of each type of item they select in order to speed up the transactions at the register.