The Friends of the Library book sale was bustling Monday.
Shoppers wandered through each aisle of the warehouse at 430 N. Main St., where about 500,000 donated items were housed just two days prior. Now, most of those items – ranging from books to CDs to comic books – have new homes.
“It’s the best recycling program we have in Gainesville,” said volunteer coordinator Liz Jones, 80.
Jones said there were more than 108,000 items left as of Sunday, but had “no earthly idea” how many had been sold since it began.
“We seem to be doing better than we had been in the spring,” she said.
Every shelf, rack and bin was loaded with donated books.
Lacey Rhea, 30, and her husband, Logan, 32, browsed children’s books with their 6-month-old baby, Lydia, in tow. While Logan held Lydia, Lacey cradled a few John Lithgow books, with “Marsupial Sue” topping the pile.
“I pretty much only buy my books from this book sale,” she said. She said she and her husband might look for some books for themselves, but they were mainly buying for Lydia.
“Pretty much everything we do now is for this one,” Rhea said. “She took over.”
In the architecture section, Alex Rosenberg, 24, stood next to a growing pile of books, flipping through pictures of old buildings.
“When I was a kid, my brother lived in Gainesville, so I’ve been coming here for 15 years,” the UF business and philosophy senior said. “Me and my dad would fill up boxes, and my mom would yell at us.”
He said he couldn’t remember what kinds of books he wanted to buy when he was 10 – probably comic books and records.
This time, he said he fell in love with picture books.
His pile included a van Gogh art collection book, an architecture picture book and an anatomy textbook.
“For a dollar, you can learn everything that’s ever been learned about the human body,” said Rosenberg, who had been to the sale four times within two days and bought 20 books so far. “I’ll probably get 20 more.”
[A version of this story ran on page 4 on 10/28/2014]
