What’s Happening at the Library: The Prodigious Black Friday Book Sale

Published 9:28 am Tuesday, November 26, 2019

The library’s annual Black Friday Book Sale returns from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday, Nov. 29, and Saturday, Nov. 30. It’s an event that has become, for many print aficionados in Central Kentucky, the traditional prelude to curling up with a good book and a hot cup of tea on a cold winter day.

You would have to go to the North Pole and listen to Santa crowing Ho! Ho! Ho! to experience the heartfelt joy Black Friday Book Sale shoppers feel when they leave the library with as many bags of books as they like, purchased for only $3 per bag.

Yes, you read that right … $3 for a bag of books — not $3 per book.

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Some book dealers regularly charge more than that per book-even during the holiday season — but they have to work that out with the holiday spirits that visit them. Dickens’ working manuscript of “A Christmas Carol” suggests one of Scrooge’s greatest transgressions was inflating the price of “Sense and Sensibility” during the Holidays.

Rest assured that doesn’t happen at the library’s Black Friday Book Sale. It’s $3 for a bag of books, all day, both days.

Tuck a Jane Austen into a bag with a few James Pattersons, a biography of Cher, a couple of James Lane Allen’s Kentucky classics and numerous youth volumes, take it up to the checkout table and pay only $3.

I can tell you for certain circulation managers Lynn Wills and Caleb Diederich, who organize and facilitate the display of thousands of adult, youth and children’s fiction and nonfiction books, have not had an admonitory visit from holiday ghosts since they began their sales. They have also been in the Top 100 of Santa’s Nice List each year.

You don’t even have to search for a book sale bag. The library supplies all the bags for the sale.

So, feast gloriously on Thanksgiving. If you want any cooking or decorating tips for the feast, remember the library has a fabulous, comprehensive selection of cookbooks and decorating books.

Some of the best are at the front of the library on the octagon display table near the public access computers. Those books include “The Magic of Gingerbread,” by Catherine Beddal (call No. 641.8654 Bedd), and for those of you who don’t cook but love stirring, near mystical ethnographies, Piers Vitebsky’s “The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia” (call No. 305.8947 Vite).

The library will be closed for Thanksgiving Wednesday, Nov. 27, and Thursday, Nov. 28. So come into the library this weekend or early next week for all your book and media needs.

Besides the book sale, the only other program next week is All Over the Page Book Group meeting at 11 a.m. Monday. “Call Your Daughter Home” by Deb Spera is the book for November. Struggling to recover after a natural pest invasion devastates the economy of 1924 South Carolina, three fierce Southern women unite against terrible injustices that have overshadowed their small-town community. Books are available at the circulation desk.

The library reopens at 9 a.m. Friday, Nov. 29, as usual.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

In the words of that super jazz-age crooner, saxophonist and movie star Louis Jordan, “Let the Joy Begin!”

John Maruskin is director of adult services at the Clark County Public Library. He can be reached at john.clarkbooks@gmail.com.