You find yourself feeling suddenly unprepared in line between a man with two heavy-duty canvas tote bags and a man with a large plastic box on wheels. The line takes 10 minutes because the building is at fire capacity, and you start worrying about what a fire hazard a building full of books might be. Whatever anxieties you developed waiting in line are put aside as you enter the building and look up at the ceiling, cavernous and covered in fans. The aisles of shelves are lined with books for what seems like miles. Why go to Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, or any other natural wonder when you could step inside this building and instantly feel awe at the sheer quantity of books before you? There’s nothing like a billion books to put things in perspective.
Each year I like to think I get better at controlling my impulse of seeing cheap things and buying them simply because of their admirable price tag. How could I pass up so many books for such good prices? With every book under the sun compiled in one place, it is easy to have the mindset that you may never see these books again, so you’d better get them while you can. This year though, I did limit myself. I resisted buying every Hemingway book there despite the fact that I might want to move to Paris and retrace Hemingway’s steps. I didn’t buy Things Fall Apart, even though in 30 years I might remember ninth-grade English and want to refer back to Okonkwo and the yams.
While it’s called a book sale, there is an impressive quantity of other media and print materials, from maps, posters, and postcards to cassettes, records, and CDs. Last year, I bought an excessive number of maps thinking I could do some cute and quirky DIY projects—papering a desk or some farfetched plan like that. This year I decided to focus my efforts and energies on music, because obviously books and maps are dangerous territories. It turned out that this was a good choice; there were records and cassettes galore, probably because they are dying relics. It seemed like a more justified use of my money because they could actually be gone in a few years, but then again, so could books. Art that isn’t digitized is dying, so the book sale is the perfect place for anyone who relishes the past and values the feeling of paper in their hands.
For three weekends, twice a year, the Friends of the Tompkins County Public Library Book Sale is held at 509 Esty St. in downtown Ithaca. The May and October sales are the largest sources of funding for TCPL. Run completely by volunteers, it is quite a feat that over 250,000 items (not quite a billion, but impressive nonetheless) are organized and sold twice a year. The first weekend of the sale is always the priciest, with hardcover books starting at $4.50 each. Prices drop each weekend, with all items being only 10 cents on the last Monday (known as Dime Day), and as many books as can be fit in a Wegmans shopping bag for only $1 on the final Tuesday of the sale. Whether you’ve never been there or you count down the days each year, be sure to stop by when the sale starts again on the first weekend of May.