And they think we sit around reading magazines

This past Saturday was Old Hallowell Day in new Hallowell. Very big deal that encourages citizens to celebrate their city (smallest city in the state of Maine), and bring folks in from around and about, to spend money at the local merchants. There's a road race, a parade, lots of junk food for sale down at the river, etc.

As usual our library had a book sale. It's generally the most successful of the three we have during the year (the others are during the town's Fall Fest, and at Mardi Gras), at least partly because it's held on the lawn, where passers-by can be lured in.

The sales are lucrative fund-raisers for the library, but they are a lot of work, much of it hard physical labor. When people bring donated books in, one of my staff has to go through them, pulling out any we might want to add to the collection (someone will have to check them against the catalog, to make sure we don't already have them), tossing any that are in too bad a shape (it kills me the way people "hate to throw away books," so will bring us stuff that's grown mildew, sitting in the attic or basement for years, which we then have to throw away), then put them into one of the several boxes we always have sitting on the office floor. One box holds hardback fiction, another, paperbacks, another, kids' books, another, cookbooks, etc. When a box is full it has to be labeled and carted down the stairs to our dark, dank basement.

This last step is the initial "hard physical labor;" carrying heavy boxes of books carefully down stairs and around to where they can be set down is not fun. But the real killer comes the evening before a sale. All those boxes that have been collecting for months have to be brought back upstairs, along with the long tables that they will be set out on (and no, there is noplace to store them upstairs). For the past three sales we have had the use of three brawny young men from the local pre-release program, which has helped enormously, but there are still plenty of boxes to be carried by the rest of us. The first couple of years that I was in this job the volunteer helpers were almost all elderly members of our Friends' organization, and their equally elderly spouses. I was always worried someone was going to drop dead of a stroke or heart attack.

Fortunately those folks have pretty much retired from the field, but unfortunately, younger blood, and muscle, has not stepped in to replace them. Last Friday night the volunteers who showed up were two middle-aged male members of my Board, one younger, though not really young, female member, and two other women, also no longer young. And the 63-year-old library director, who has the physical strength of a guinea pig, and the stamina of a four-packs-a-day smoker (note that i've never smoked in my life). I had sent out a plea for volunteers in our monthly newsletter, which goes out to a large number of patrons electronically, and a print version of which is distributed around town. Had also sent a Reminder email a couple of days before the event. The only responses I received were from two also-no-longer-young-women who apologized that they weren't going to be around, or they would certainly help.

Where are the men? Where are the teenaged kids? I hate lugging boxes of books up and down stairs (and note that all books not sold, except for those I'm quick enough to toss into boxes set aside for trash, have to be re-boxed and taken back downstairs at the end of the sale); and for the Old Hallowell Day sale that re-boxing and labeling and carting is done in the heat and humidity of a typical Maine summer's day. I had also volunteered to work one of the cash tables for the last hour of the sale -- because of the shortage of volunteers for that task, as well -- though I ended up spending most of the hour doing the aforementioned weeding of books that were obviously not going to sell, no matter how many sales we put them through. I was able to do this because the president of our Board, who had nobly agreed to walk in the parade, carrying one end of the library's banner, had returned from the parade and collapsed into the chair next to his wife, who was helping me. Business was very slow at our table -- the Friends' items-for-sale table, rather than the regular cashier's table -- so I left them to it, condemning myself to standing under that heartless sun, discarding or repacking books.

So we made lots of money, and thank god it's over.