This time, the bets are on Fifty Shades of Grey.
Every spring, the previous year’s bestsellers flood into the Times Colonist book sale.
In 2012, it was the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series. In previous years, it was Eat, Pray, Love (though not, alas, the men’s equivalent: Eat Prey, Love), a million copies of The Da Vinci Code, a billion Harry Potters, the Atkins Diet book (good riddance) and, at the first TC sale back in 1998, Iacocca: An Autobiography, as well as Future Shock. Judging by the condition of the books, nobody had read more than 30 pages into Future Shock before giving up.
Fifty Shades, by contrast, should come dog-eared from beginning to end, if you go by the number of people who claim not to have read it but who can quote volume three verbatim. (The quote of 2012 was on Twitter: “If my mother makes one more Fifty Shades of Grey reference, I’m going to meet my goal weight.”)
Anyway, the 16th version of the annual book drive is upon us.
By now, you know how it works: We ask readers to donate used books for resale, with the proceeds going to literacy-related programs on Vancouver Island.
The sale itself will be May 4 and 5 at the Victoria Curling Club at 1952 Quadra St.
First comes this weekend’s book collection. The main drop-off will be in the parking lot of the curling club on Saturday and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. both days. If you’re donating books, please enter off Pembroke Street between Quadra and Blanshard, then follow the volunteers’ directions. The process will go faster if you stay in your car while they remove your books.
For the first time, a separate, shorter drop-off will be held in the West Shore, a convenient alternative for residents there. It will be on Saturday only, from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m., at Westhills at the end of the Langford Parkway.
Packing your books in boxes or bags that you don’t want back would be a big help (or, in the case of the Fifty Shades trilogy, you may prefer to tie them together).
Books in good condition only, please (I feel guilty about this, having broken more spines than a rodeo bull, torn off more covers than Charlie Sheen) and no encyclopedias, textbooks, outdated reference works, Reader’s Digest condensed books or National Geographic issues or other magazines.
Before boxing your donations, it would be a good idea to check inside the covers to make sure they don’t hold precious family photos, old love letters, banknotes, passports or marijuana, all of which have turned up at previous collections. (We also got an urn containing the cremated remains of a cat, which no one has mustered the gumption to chuck yet.)
After the weekend, hundreds of volunteers will sort hundreds of thousands of volumes for the sale. (Anyone interested in volunteering, either at the drop-off or subsequent sorting, is asked to email [email protected]).
The prices at the May 4-5 sale will be unchanged from past years: hardcovers $3; softcovers $2; paperbacks and children’s books $1.
It’s all feel-good stuff, has been ever since 1998, when the book sale grew out of then Times Colonist reporter Susan Danard’s series of stories on funding cuts to school libraries. (By the way, Victoria-raised Susan completed the Boston Marathon 10 minutes before Monday’s explosions.)
Last year’s sale funnelled $153,706 into the Times Colonist’s Raise-A-Reader program, which spread $340,000 among 173 Vancouver Island schools and non-profit groups.
It’s win-win for everyone: Donors make room on their shelves, buyers get cheap books, literacy gets a boost. No grey areas, though there be a Fifty Shades of Grey section.
