Illustration by Tabi Walters
On an overcast day in July, the parking lot at the Veterans Park pool was half-full. Curiously, so was the parking lot for the park’s closed-for-the-summer ice arena.
At the Zamboni door, drivers were pulling up with bags and boxes full of books to a waiting line of wagons to unload. Inside, more women sorted the volumes onto long tables with labels like “fiction,” “children’s,” and “biography” scattered around the vast, iceless arena. Volunteers armed with laptops identified the most valuable volumes and set them aside to be sold directly to local book dealers. (Last year, an early collection of Jack London short stories went for almost $100.)
The Ann Arbor chapter of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) was gearing up for its seventy-first fundraising sale. How many books pass through each summer on their way to the sales tables at Washtenaw Community College in September? “Thousands!” says chapter president Ann Ringia.
“It’s probably the biggest sale in town,” says bookseller Gene Alloway. He plans to line up early on Friday, September 5, when the three-day event begins at WCC’s Morris Lawrence Building. “The books are in fine shape,” says the owner of Motte & Bailey Booksellers, “and they have lots of different subjects.”
Close to seventy-five, says volunteer Polly Pan. Top sellers include Americana (especially books about Ann Arbor and the U-M), natural sciences, technology and engineering, and recent fiction and nonfiction. Pan says that in recent years the number of paperback romances being donated has dropped dramatically, and the once-ubiquitous “for Dummies” guides “have all but vanished.”
Pam Ehrhart says they’re also seeing fewer donated children’s paperbacks. She wonders if kids are reading books online—or just not reading for pleasure. On an upward trend are what another volunteer calls “sci-fi fantasies.”
Everything is half-price on Saturday and $8 a bag on Sunday. The leftovers are given to interested nonprofits (including small-town libraries) or, if all else fails, recycled.
Last year, the sale netted about $27,000 for students at WCC, EMU, and the U-M, and it adds up—from 2003 to 2024, to half a million dollars. Pan shares a quote from fellow member Barbara Petoskey: “The books go into the trucks as books, and they come out as scholarships.”