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PRINCETON: Preparing for Bryn-Mawr-Wellesly Book Sale

Staff photos by Mark Czajkowski

By Pat Summers, Special Writer
   Numbers help tell the story of a 78-year-old Princeton tradition — the Bryn Mawr-Wellesley Book Sale, which will run from Wednesday, March 25, through Sunday, March 29.
   As you read this, the last of nearly 2,000 boxes of books are making their way to Princeton Day School. By close of sale, those books — totaling close to last year’s 65,000 volumes — are likely to have brought in from $80,000 to $90,000 for the colleges’ scholarship funds.
   And there’s more: As of a visit on March 4, nine of those hundreds of boxes held books about pets and animals; 20 held poetry, and 51, cooking. Some 60 other fiction and nonfiction categories — from adventure to old and unusual; from humor to language/linguistics; from computers to reference — were also represented among the 400-500 boxes that have filled the second floor of the book-donation barn three or four times over since April 2008.
   The numbers all add up to a unique community-wide-and-beyond event that receives notable biblio-donations (one year, gorgeous mountaineering books; this year, a trove of Judaica); specifies unacceptable books (Harlequin romances and condensed books, for instance), and attracts buyers from Maine to Virginia.
   Wherever they’re from, people plan to be in the Princeton area for the event, which benefits students at the two colleges in its name: Bryn Mawr (the original beneficiary) and, since 2000, Wellesley.
   Each year’s sale begins in a brown book barn behind the row of stately old houses on Princeton’s Vandeventer Avenue. That’s where books are donated, sorted, categorized, boxed and moved out. Up to four times annually, Harris movers slide the bulging boxes down a ramp from the second floor into moving vans, trucking them either to their own warehouse or directly to PDS.
   Once at the sale site, boxes are placed near tables that are also labeled by category, and the books are priced (in pencil, non-negotiable), arranged and ready-to-go.
   So far this may sound like an impersonal process, with books somehow moving around on their own and the sale simply taking place. Definitely not so. Around 100 volunteers work on each year’s event. Some — alums, their families, their neighbors — come to the barn on Wednesday and/or Saturday mornings, from 10 a.m. to noon, to help sort the constant flow of donations. Still others work at PDS on setup, pricing, sales and checkout.
   Like many participants, one volunteer, a Bryn Mawr “alum,” designs the floor layout for book tables based on the number of boxes in each category. That she now lives in Germany is beside the point; she just does her part from there. Another volunteer periodically takes pictures of the tables during the sale to get an idea of what’s selling or not, yielding ideas for next year’s sale. Another’s husband rigged the large propane blower that warms the first floor.
   One person clearly knows everyone involved with the sale as well as what must be done, and how and when, and she easily cites names and numbers, history, precedents and changes.
   Sarah Ferguson, now marking her 20th year as “manager of the book barn,” talks about the continuous work that goes into the event with animation and pride that could teach Tom Sawyer lessons about motivation.
   Lively discussions among the volunteers help decide which categories are right for books.
   ”Literary classics,” for instance, is a generational choice, depending on when they went to school. Truman Capote has been elevated to that category. “Those movies came out and he’d been dead awhile. It was time,” Ms. Ferguson says. Basically, though, category depends on “where will this sell best?”
   For some reason, “biography” as such doesn’t sell well, “so we moved books out of that category and into others.” Books about John Adams can be found in American history, for example, while those on Bette Davis are in performing arts, she adds.
   Uncommon in most book sales, categories make it easier for people to find what they’re after.
   ”It’s still not like going to a book store and saying, ‘I’m looking for this particular book,’” Ms. Ferguson says, “but at least you’re not weeding through books in French for knitting patterns.”
   Connected with the book sale since her family moved to town in 1984, the Bryn Mawr ‘79 alum began as a volunteer. She moved into the manager’s role five years later, bringing her children with her: then 3 years old, Andrew (Princeton ‘08) watched “Sesame Street” on a black-and-white TV; Martha (Princeton ‘11) was a baby in a backpack.
   This family’s all about books. Ms. Ferguson met her husband Stephen (curator of rare books at Princeton University’s Firestone Library) at professional gatherings she had attended as a rare book cataloguer with the Library Company of Philadelphia. Her library degree from Columbia University’s program in rare books and printing history gave her “useful training in the field” and helps her “keep things going” here.
   And the betting is that things will “go,” despite today’s economy.
   ”Yes, people have less to spend,” Ms. Ferguson readily acknowledges, “but then again, buying second hand is so much cheaper. Princeton’s the kind of town where people have more books than they have room for, and there are always people who want more books than they have money for, so it’s like being a dating service for books!”
   The matchmaking will begin on Wednesday, March 25.