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Jack Knox: Books mean the world to book sale volunteers

I’ve never seen Al Haines when he wasn’t slightly winded, wiping away the sweat with a work-gloved hand. But then, I’ve never seen Al outside the Times Colonist Book Drive, where he uses a pallet jack to drag around mountains of full cardboard boxes.
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Laureen Evans, left, and Jan Murray look at a book in the children's section amid preparations for the Times Colonist Book Sale at the Victoria Curling Club on Saturday and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days.

Bookworm 2016.jpgI’ve never seen Al Haines when he wasn’t slightly winded, wiping away the sweat with a work-gloved hand.

But then, I’ve never seen Al outside the Times Colonist Book Drive, where he uses a pallet jack to drag around mountains of full cardboard boxes. It’s really a job for a Clydesdale, not a man, but it’s one he has been doing — for free — for 10 years.

“My back is OK but my feet hurt,” he says. Seven hours a day on the concrete floor of the Victoria Curling Club will do that.

The Times Colonist name is on this weekend’s annual charity sale, but in reality the event belongs to its volunteers. There are maybe 300 of them, including a core of 100 or so who come back every year, spending two, three, four weeks on the book drive each spring.

They are a disparate lot. Haines is a retired provincial civil servant who was drawn to the sale by his ongoing hunt for out-of-copyright works to publish as free e-books. In Canada, that means any book whose author has been dead for 50 years or more. For the U.S. version of Project Gutenberg, as it is known, anything published anywhere in the world before 1923 is considered to be in the public domain. So far, Haines has scanned 1,600 volumes for use on the web.

As Haines does the grunt work with the pallet jack, Gladys Barman is sorting donated books by category. By mid-morning, the 80-year-old is already on her third job of the day. She gets up at 2 a.m. to deliver the Times Colonist, just as she has done for the past 23 years. (With three routes to cover, she hauls her papers around in a baby carriage.) She’s also in her 25th year volunteering with Thrifty Foods’ Sendial program. She has pitched in at every TC sale except for the very first one in 1998.

“I’m a bookaholic,” she says.

Barman was born and raised in Oregon, then signed on with the U.S. Foreign Service, first in Rome, then in west Africa and finally Montreal, where she met her husband.

Upstairs in the children’s books section, Jan Murray also has an international background. She lived through three coups and a jeep crash (it was hit by a landslide) while doing development work for the likes of CUSO and Care Canada in such places as the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and the Kalahari. Seeing how hard it was for kids in countries where books were scarce deepened her belief in the value of childhood literacy.

Murray is also one of those for whom volunteering is a way of life: Women in Need on Mondays, the Red Cross on Wednesdays and a downtown ambassador role in the summer, interspersed with events like the TC 10K and October’s marathon.

Downstairs, Murray’s sister Linda Burton is sorting history books. She flies out from Ontario every spring to do so, combining the volunteer work with a visit.

In short, the volunteers are pure gold. Most are retired. Many are former teachers (At first I was afraid they would correct my grammar, so never spoke around them. They thought me a mute, and treated me kindly.)

Most have nothing to do with the Times Colonist. All are passionate about the cause. “If you’re literate, it frees you to do anything in the world you want to do — if you pay attention,” says ex-educator Laureen Evans.

The volunteers are like a club that only meets once a year. Sometimes they don’t even recognize one another out of context. (Bob Woodrow was momentarily baffled when greeted in London’s Heathrow airport.)

Yet when they return to the curling club, they pick up conversations where they left off 11 months previous. “You meet the best people over a stack of books,” says Penny Heath.

Wayne Aitken concurs: “I really enjoy the camaraderie.” Aitken will be found marshalling the check-out line at this weekend’s sale. If you happen to find a used copy of Blisters and Bliss, the hiking guide to the West Coast Trail that he co-authored (the eighth edition was just published), he might sign it for you.

But before the doors open, the volunteers must complete the sorting. Heath finds satisfaction in the job they do in just two weeks, transforming the post book-collection chaos into order. “I look out and go ‘we did that.’ ”

Book sale basics

• It’s this Saturday and Sunday at the Victoria Curling Club, 1952 Quadra St., from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days.

• The books are cheap: hardcovers $3; softcovers $2; pocket books and children’s books $1.

• Payment is by cash, debit, Mastercard, Visa or American Express. No cheques.

• Pay parking is available in the lot that serves the curling club and Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre. There is also free parking along Quadra, but be aware that parking on some of the nearby side streets is for residents only.

• The No. 6 bus goes along Quadra.

• Once the sale is over, representatives of schools and non-profit groups may help themselves to the remaining books, for free, from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m. on Monday, May 2.

• The money raised at the sale is funnelled through the Times Colonist Raise A Reader fund to literacy-related projects on Vancouver Island.

>> Click here to download the Times Colonist book sale map (PDF)