The AAUW Book Sale that takes place every September at WCC’s Morris Lawrence Building is one of the largest in the country. The sale, whose proceeds are used mainly for scholarships, grosses about $40,000 over one weekend, and that’s a lot of used books. Finding a place to collect and sort all those books in the months prior to the September sale used to be one of the group’s biggest headaches.
The current space solution came about in a circuitous way. AAUW member Jennie Lombard and her husband own and rent out a few lakefront cottages in an obscure part of the U.P. Lombard always puts out some of her old magazines for rainy-day reading.
Tony Pinto, relaxing for a quiet week in his rented cottage on Au Train Lake, away from his job managing commercial properties in southeastern Michigan, noticed the Ann Arbor address on the magazines his landlady had left lying around, and mentioned to her that she must live near the Maple Village shopping center in Ann Arbor, one of his properties.
Lombard was on that one like a northwoods mosquito. Long story short, this will be the fourth year Pinto has donated a large empty retail space to the AAUW for the summer: in July and August, the group will be taking donations in the former Hancock Fabrics space next to Dunham’s.
