From cookbooks to crime novels and poetry to prose, Rachel Pastiva says customers can find “gems” in every genre at the Friends of the Ann Arbor District Library’s book shop.
Looking through donated books, Rachel Pastiva sometimes finds a telltale sticker or index card with her own writing from a past job. | Photo: J. Adrian Wylie
Pastiva is executive director of Friends, now celebrating its seventieth year. The nonprofit sells books donated by the community—as well as games, puzzles, and other items—at its book shop, online store, and on bookshelves at the library’s branches, to raise money for the library. In recent years, Friends has donated $100,000 annually to the library; it also funds the prizes for the AADL’s Summer Game.
Shelves are refreshed weekly in the downtown library’s main-floor book shop from inventory in the basement, where volunteers lug donations from the loading dock, sort titles, and curate the collections by subject area. Most are $2 each—and on the first of each month, unsold books are are discounted to fifty cents.
“Books have been my life,” says Friends volunteer Dietmar Wagner, seventy-nine, who started shelving books for AADL at age sixteen and retired after more than three decades as an AADL reference librarian. He relishes working with the “tight-knit group” of fifty volunteers—many who are also retired librarians and teachers. Though he can’t squeeze more books into his house (he still has his childhood collection from Germany), he says it’s enough for him to help others who still value “holding a book in their hands.”
Pastiva’s inspired by how Ann Arborites do their part to keep books “in circulation and out of the landfill”: a U-M professor regularly buys books to use as materials for student art projects; Friends volunteer Marolin Bellefleur “lovingly repurposes” book illustrations to create greeting cards for sale at the shop; and many customers purchase “like new” books to use as gifts. (The newest books—including slightly damaged ones donated by Literati Bookstore—are sold in the Friends online store, but even they seldom cost more than $10.)
Volunteers sometimes find personal treasures within the tomes, including baby pictures, postcards, love letters—and even $2,000 in cash in a book in Russian (eventually donated to Friends). Pastiva—who worked at Borders and managed Crazy Wisdom Bookstore—has found books with a telltale sticker or index card with her own writing from previous jobs. It was “like bumping into my former self,” she laughs.
Because “we’re in a highly educated college town,” and retiring professors often donate their books, Pastiva says there are opportunities for customers to “go really deep into certain subject areas,” and “build their own libraries.”
On September 30, Friends will host its first sale from an estate, featuring art books from the late watercolor artist Martha Armstrong’s collection. Other community events include Friends’ wildly popular bag sales—all the books customers can fit into a bag for five bucks. There’s a Friends’ “Free Books” corner in the downtown branch (“People made a run for it” the first day the library reopened after the pandemic, Pastiva says), and she says some customers “only shop from our 25-cent cart” of books inside the shop.
Friends even takes requests: Right now, volunteers are on the lookout for Mary Higgins Clark books for one regular customer, and a 1970s dictionary for another. The organization helps to stock Little Free Libraries around town and also donates to the Books for Prisons program. Pastiva says they are always accepting donations of books in “salable condition,” as well as new members and volunteers.
The organization has a tentative date of summer 2024 to move its operations to Parkland Plaza off Jackson Rd., where the AADL has purchased property. The new location will nearly triple the store’s space. Pastiva feels confident it will become a favorite destination: “Once people find us, they’re hooked.”
