Washington’s Book Store: The Rebook Room!

We often hear Washington residents wishing for a bookstore here in town, not knowing that the Library actually has a bookstore! On the lower level, right next to some other unknown treasures (the MakeIT Place and the Grayson Archive room), is the Rebook Room!

In the Rebook Room, most hardback books sell for $1.00 and paperbacks for $.50. We sometimes also have music or audiobook CDs and DVDs “in stock.” Some “almost brand new” adult hardbacks go for the bargain price of $2.00. We stock a cart in the Library foyer with some “gems” to tempt you but there is always more downstairs!

Our stock in the Rebook Room comes from a couple different sources. When we are withdrawing books from the library’s collection (a necessary step to maintaining a current library collection — see note below) they will generally end up in the Rebook Room. In addition, many of the voracious readers in our community generously donate books to the library, either right after they’ve finished reading them or when they’re reorganizing their book shelves every few years.

Often our patrons ask us if they can give us the 500 books that they found when cleaning out their parent’s house. The answer to that is “probably not.” If the books have been stored in a moldy basement or dusty attic for the last 50 years, we definitely don’t want them. Mold spreads fast and we don’t want to endanger the other materials in our collection. If the books are paperbacks with yellowing and brittle pages, again, we’ll also pass (though we’ve seen some paperbacks from 30 years ago that are holding together better than some made 3 years ago).

When patrons donate current books to us, they often hope we may add them to our collection (even though we always let donors know that if we don’t add them to the collection they’ll be put in the Rebook Room) and are later disappointed to see them in the ReBook Room or on our sale cart in the foyer. Often, that will be because we already have the book in our collection because we thought it was great too! We’ll often compare the condition of the donated book to the one in the collection just to see how our copy is holding up and might switch it out. We very very rarely keep two copies of the same book in our adult collections, though we might have duplicates of a well-loved book in our picture book collection.

Here’s some advice to potential book donors:

· We welcome recent adult fiction in good condition (published in the last 5 years or so) in hardback or paperback. Yes, we do like “the classics,” so if you have some in very good condition we’ll probably take them regardless of publication date. And there are some authors like Grisham or Clancy or Steel that we’ll take for the Rebook Room even if they’re older titles.

· We accept donations of adult non-fiction books if they’ve been published within the last 5 years. Craft books always seem to be popular in the Rebook Room. Titles dealing with medical or legal issues will generally need to have been published within the last 2 years. We don’t accept textbooks.

· Children’s books should be in good condition without rips/tears, marks or missing pages. We prefer recent hardbacks — any children’s paperback book that has lasted more than a couple years evidently wasn’t very well “loved” by its owner so we may not love it either.

· We don’t take donations of old National Geographics. We do accept some magazines — check with us before bringing.

NOTE to everyone who hates to hear that we remove books from our collection: We love adding new books to the collection just as much as you all love reading them. But since we have to maintain an orderly library without stacking books on the floor or on 8 foot high shelving, to add some, we have to remove some. This is math and like you, we’ve always liked reading better.

Some books we can keep longer than others. We look at a number of factors to decide whether a book will go or stay — not just whether it’s been checked out or not (though that is big factor in most public library collections). In the adult non-fiction collection, we keep a close eye on medical and legal books — generally anything over 5 years old will go. In the travel section, do you really want to take that Fodor’s Paris published in 2012 on vacation with you? We pride ourselves on our great adult fiction collection, but we acknowledge that to keep adding new titles, sometimes we have to be ruthless — if an author isn’t publishing any longer and no one has checked out any of their books in the last 5 years, we probably can’t keep them. But keep in mind, you can rescue them in the Rebook Room!