Library Stocks Books to Buy and to Borrow

Linda McKimson admits she’s a bookaholic. But she rarely goes on book-buying binges at local bookstores.

Instead, she goes to the South Pasadena Public Library, where she often purchases books rather than checking them out.

The library is one of the few in Southern California where donated books, ranging in price from 20 cents to $20, are sold in a store operated year-round, rather than through the more customary annual sale.

Looks for Good Buys

“I buy books at regular bookstores, but only if I can’t find them here,” said McKimson of Pasadena as she browsed through the bookshelves in the small store on the second floor of the library. “I go all over to library book sales. I go where there are good buys,” she said.

Charles Cooper of Eagle Rock, who collects mystery fiction, said he visits the library bookstore once a week.

“I buy books rather than checking them out of the library because they are books I want to save,” he said. “And somehow it’s not the same when you have to return it.”

Another customer, Marguerite Fetzer of South Pasadena, said she loves old maps and sheet music, which the store sometimes stocks, and shops for them at the library. On Tuesday, she found and bought a map of London for 25 cents she plans to use during a visit there.

“I also buy books that are too out-of-date to be in the library,” she said. “I’m interested in the Victorian Era and recently bought, for 50 cents, a book by Leslie Shane about London in the early 1880s.”

Opened Four Years Ago

The bookstore opened four years ago after the South Pasadena library was remodeled and the Friends of the Library lost the space in the basement they had used to store donated books, which were sold at an annual book fair.

In the process, the Friends gained a 15- by 30-foot room upstairs, from which they now operate the bookstore, open weekdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

An estimated 250 customers a month come into the store and look through shelves containing nearly every type of book in both hard cover and paperback. The operation nets about $1,000 a month for the Friends, who use the proceeds to buy books and special equipment for the library and to support various programs there.

In the back of the store, volunteers sort and price books to be put on the shelves.

“The books run the gamut from reference sets to mysteries,” said Sally Swan, a Friends of the Library volunteer who is in charge of the bookstore operation.

Requests in Card File

“We have one customer who comes in regularly looking for poetry while another is interested in religion. Children’s books are popular and people buy paperbacks before going on a trip. We also keep a card file of requests from customers and notify them if we get the book they want.”

Books are arranged on the shelves according to categories, which include religion, foreign language, biography, art, nonfiction, science fiction, geography, travel, health, food, Westerns, mystery, romance, children’s and fiction.

The store, patterned after one at the Huntington Beach Public Library, stocks mostly hardbacks. A hard-cover fiction book costs anywhere from 20 cents to $5, depending on the author, the condition of the book and how recently it was published.

In stock this week was a copy of “The Andromeda Strain” by Michael Crichton, published as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in 1969. It was in good condition, and priced at 40 cents.

Nearby was a copy of “Too Much Too Soon,” by Jacqueline Briskin, published in 1985. That hard-cover copy of the book, which has just been released in paperback, was priced at $3--a bargain compared to the publisher’s hard-cover list price of $17.95.

Two Hard-Cover Micheners

There were two hard-cover books by James Michener, both in good condition, but one, “The Source,” published in 1965, was priced at 45 cents, while the other, “Poland,” published in 1983, was $2.

Occasionally a browser might come across a rare book or a first edition.

But such finds have been unusual lately, because the volunteers who sort through the 400 to 500 books donated each month have been setting aside the most prized gifts for an auction that will be held Saturday at 1:30 p.m. in the library’s Community Room at 1115 El Centro St. A similar auction three years ago netted $8,500 for the Friends.

The books to be sold this weekend include sets of works by O. Henry, Bret Harte, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Washington Irving, Carl Sandburg, Honore de Balzac, Tobias Smollet and Will and Ariel Durant.

Also available are 57 Christopher Morley first editions, three of them signed, which will be auctioned in two lots.

First Editions

Other first editions include books by William Saroyan, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, Margaret Mitchell, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Lucius Beebe, Zane Grey, Sinclair Lewis, Eudora Welty, George Santayana, Aldous Huxley and J. D. Salinger.

Rare books include Alphonse Daudet’s “Tartarin of the Alps,” published in London in 1888, and an 1837 edition of “Sketches by Boz” by Charles Dickens.

The auction will be combined with a sale of paintings, prints, sheet music and old postcards.

It will also include a traditional sale of what the Friends call “last chance” books, donated volumes that are in poorer condition than those sold in the bookstore, as well as library duplicates and discards. Some are books that have been on the bookstore shelf for six months and must be moved to make room for more recent donations. Most are paperbacks, but others include one of two hardback copies of “Mistral’s Daughter,” by Judith Krantz, priced at 40 cents. The other hardback is in the bookstore, priced at $1.

After the auction, things will return to normal at the bookstore, where sales keep the inventory moving so a large storage area is not required. But the location of the bookstore, upstairs and away from the main library, is a drawback.

55 Other Volunteers

“People are somehow reluctant to get on the elevator and go up to the second floor,” said Swan, who is assisted by 55 other volunteers in running the bookstore.

“So we have gotten marketing-conscious. We entice people in with a theme table and a ‘Last Chance’ shelf on the first floor.”

The theme table, which featured romance novels for Valentine’s Day and gift books--those in such good condition they can be given as gifts--for Christmas. Currently the table features travel books and the next theme will be books related to movies.

“Some people just don’t come upstairs to the bookstore which is why we have ‘last chance’ in the main part of the library,” said Dorothy Cohen, one of 55 bookstore volunteers who is on the Friends board of trustees.

The “last chance” shelf also serves to free shelf space in the bookstore, which always has more books than it can accommodate.

In fact, residents are so generous with donations that storage space is at a premium. Boxes of donated books spill over from the allotted space into City Librarian Jean Jones’ office, where the books are stacked against the walls. In return for the favor, first choice of donated books goes to the library’s borrowers rather than the buyers.