By Fred Tuccillo
Fortunately for this week’s Bryn-Mawr-Wellseley Book Sale, not everyone is as reluctant to part with used books as I am. That’s why they’ll have 80,000 books available for purchase beginning Wednesday and I’ll still have my complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica Juniors.
It’s not as if they’ll be missed, though. Encyclopedias still turn up at the book sale, according to Elizabeth Romanaux, Wellesley Class of 1978.
”We don’t take a lot of them but we do still see them,” she told me last week. “We sometimes get them as part of collections that people may buy because they look great on a bookshelf. You know, those leather-bound books with gold lettering.”
The outsides of my Britannica Juniors no longer look that great on a bookshelf and the insides have fallen a bit behind the times. Page 275 of Volume 14 insists on telling me that Dwight D. Eisenhower is president of the United States — all 48 of them.
On the other hand, Amelia Earhart is still missing.
But antiquity is very much part of the charm of used books. And it remains in demand at the Bryn-Mawr-Wellseley Book Sale, a major fundraiser for the scholarship programs of both colleges. The sale runs through Sunday at Princeton Day School on The Great Road.
”This year, we got a very old volume of Chaucer,” said Ms. Romanaux, who has been volunteering at the sale for eight years. “Being here in Princeton, amazing things turn up sometimes. People here know about the sale, so books will come in all year. We really don’t advertise it at all; it’s mostly word of mouth. There are people who pass away and the family will give us a whole collection.”
Notable examples this week will include two very different treasures. The first is comprised of 45 boxes of Jewish-related works so old that the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., was sending someone up for an advance look, Ms. Romanaux said. “Because if there is some really rare or historic work we want to make sure it goes to the right place.”
And the second example?
”We also have 1,300 old Marvel comic books, all in plastic covers,” she said. “Apparently a collector died and the family didn’t feel like dealing with them. So some lucky girl is going to get a scholarship because of some old comic books.
”That’s the fun of it. You never know what’s going to show up. Someone once gave us a cookbook that a friend of Andy Warhol had done. And inside, Warhol had done an illustration.”
Ms. Romanaux, whose real job is as communications director at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, zeros in on her own niche at the book sale.
”I love science so I really enjoy going through all the science books that come in,” she said. “Two years ago, I found a first edition Charles Darwin.”
Finds like that are the reason that serious book dealers pay a $20 admission fee to get first crack at those 80,000 books during the first four hours of the sale’s opening day.
”That’s when the dealers come and take hundreds of books away,” Ms. Romanaux said. “I did a little survey last year and from the north, they came from as far away as Maine and from the south as far away as Virginia.”
But the dealers are pretty much done by 2 p.m. After that, admission is free and plenty of bargains remain. Paperbacks start at a dollar and hardcover books start at 20 percent of their original cover price. Eventually, even those prices drop sharply.
”The last day is $5-a-box-day,” Ms. Romanaux said. “I get a lot of books that way because I take them with me when I travel and if I’m staying in a hotel I just leave them behind. If I read a great novel, I don’t need to take it home with me. Maybe the next guest will enjoy it.”
I am calculating the odds that some unsuspecting hotel guest, in a moment of spiritual crisis, will reach into anightstand drawer for the Gideon Bible and come up with a bodice ripper or some such.
But the book sale also does its part to keep religious works circulating, Ms. Romanaux assures me. At the end, when as many as 20,000 books are still unsold, “there are groups that come and collect all the Bibles that are left over,” she said.
There are hotter categories, of course. Children’s books are among the most sought after, Ms. Romanaux said, and the sale features thousands of them.
”A lot of parents come in with kids and get age-appropriate books for them,” she said. “It’s sort of fun — the kids are all sitting around reading the books while the parents are still picking them out.”
This year, the lagging economy is a subject of some concern to the book sale’s planners, Ms. Romanaux said.
”We’re concerned that it might affect dealers a little more. They may not buy as many of the expensive architectural or art books, for example,” she said. “But I’m looking at it differently because we have so many how-to books — landscaping, gardening, cooking, how to build a deck or how to repair things around the home. Maybe in this economy people will be looking for more of those. We have so many cookbooks, maybe someone will be looking to cook more and eat out less to save money.”
Considering the economy, I thought one story Ms. Romanaux told me could be a great draw for The Bryn-Mawr-Wellesley Book sale.
”Once we found a lot of money in a book,” she said. “I think it was maybe $80.”
Forgotten cash stashed away in the pages of used books? There’s an incentive to shoppers.
But Ms. Romanaux quickly burst that bubble, adding, “One of the women went out and tracked down the person who donated the book so she could return the money.”
Such goodie-goodies, those Bryn-Mawr and Wellesley women.
Fred Tuccillo is managing editor of The Princeton Packet. His e-mail is [email protected]. For more on the Bryn-Mwar-Wellesley Book Sale, visit www.bmandwbooks.com.

