Library volunteers send excess books to a noble death

WAUSAU – The Friends of Marathon County Public Library has a problem familiar among avid readers — the nonprofit group has too many books.

So many, in fact, that thousands are destroyed when they can’t be resold.

On Friday, the organization’s volunteers sent away 17 pallets of excess books, about 15,000 total, with Better World Books for recycling or resale out of state. In the future, the group will send its books to be recycled closer to home.

Kate Srozinski, who will take over as the Friends group’s fundraising chairwoman next year, is a book collector herself and said it’s sad to see unwanted books sent away.

“You hate to just throw them away because someone, somewhere might want to read them,” Srozinski said.

The Friends group collects book donations and resells many of them to raise money for the library. The sales take place on the third floor of the Wausau branch, where there currently are about 40,000 books, lining tables in an expansive room.

Twice a week, 10 to 12 volunteers come together to sift through donations and unpopular books culled from the library’s collection. Of the 500 to 1,000 books reviewed in each session, the volunteers pull what they think they can sell. Everything else is packed up for another phase of donation or disposal.

Some of the donations are moldy and very old after spending years in garages or basements, said Gail Cain, vice president of the Friends of the Library.

“We get so many wonderful donations, but we have to cut them off somewhere,” Cain said. The group has sent away four truckloads with used-book retailer and recycler Green Is Good, Green Is Less in the last three years. Before that, excess books met a harsher demise.

“They were kind of trashed,” Cain said, “recycled or composted or burned — whatever anyone could do with them.”

Friends of the Library members agree that pulping for paper is the best end for an unsellable book. Pulping also provides some additional revenue for the group to then return to the library. On the whole, the friends contribute more than $25,000 a year to the library, covering half of the cost of the Wausau branch’s aquarium on the first floor and the summer reading program.

The popularity of e-books and a constant flow of newly published paper books pushes out old ones. Without meaning any affront to the author, Friends President Ed Cohen said the group has more books from prolific novelist Danielle Steel than it knows what to do with. He said the group sells her best copies and gets rid of the rest.

Friends of the Library also sorts out expensive and collectable books, sending them away to be sold elsewhere.

“Most of our customers are just down there looking for books to read,” Cohen said. “I don’t think we have many collectors.”

Those books get sent to Green Is Good, which pays for shipping and returns 75 percent of the sale to the Friends of the Library. It also provides a software program to help groups to search the value of old books.

Green Is Good used to collect semi-loads of books for processing, but stopped because of complicating logistics and increasing costs, said Cameron Walter, national marketing associate for the Indianapolis-based organization.

Now, Friends of the Library is looking for a local group to remove the covers of books to be recycled nearby. Cain is talking with one group that provides vocational services for people with disabilities who might be able to do that work, and get paid from the revenues.

The library doesn’t have storage capacity to collect pallets of books over time, and the local solution could allow frequent processing of smaller batches.

Despite the excess, Cohen said the group still wants donations left over from rummage sales or relocating residents. There’s a collection cart in the Wausau library near the main desk.

“We’ll take ’em all,” Cohen said. “(The sales profit) all goes back to the library after we pay taxes on it.”

The group will holds its next triannual book sale Thursday through Oct. 5. Most books sell for 50 cents or a dollar.

Nora G. Hertel can be reached at 715-845-0665. Find her on Twitter as @nghertel.