Read All About It!

Hello readers! I’d like to thank you for joining us on this journey. I hope you have found this set of blogs educational and inspirational.

We are REALLY excited to raise money to fight illiteracy!!!! Your donations of high quality, exciting books that are fun to read will be the major contributor to the funds we raise for our programming. By re-selling your books in our store, we hope to reach out to the entire city of Chicago and provide much needed literacy resources and classes for adults and children.

So I will end with the last topic of things we really can’t use. And that would be:

Things that are just not in any way books

Example: This is a mousepad. If we were considering Open Mousepads as a venture, this could work! But you can see where this is an item we can’t really use.

And I don’t mean to pick on anyone. I know how it goes, you’re packing things up! You’re like, “Hey, I don’t need this, I can’t use it, maybe they’d like it!” I’ve totally been there. But considering we receive many many donations a day it ends up being a LOT of stuff we just aren’t sure what to do with. Also, if you’re curious, email us! call us! One donor has the whole Thomas the Train Engine set with activity table, and we’re going to take it from her eventually because there are a whole series of books we could do activities with!

So this is just a friendly reminder that we really just love and only need books, but if you have something special just ask. We’d love to hear about it.

Again, we would like to say a HUGE thank you to everyone that is continuing to donate awesome books. We appreciate you spreading the word and telling others about our organization! We have multiple donations being dropped off everyday. As you can see Stacy’s living room is filled to the brim. And it looks this way about every week until we empty it into storage.

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!

In my house there are books everywhere, and there is almost no place I go that books do not eventually follow. Sometimes in the course of our adventures bad things happen. Covers get ripped off. Pages get torn out. Rain falls and text blurs.

Like all things, books are subject to destruction.

And when that happens, the kindest thing to do is consider recycling.

We know where you live.

Or, if we don’t, we can probably find out.

But in either case, an outdated print version of a school directory is not going to help. And no one is going to want to buy it.

Next up: Uncovered.

This installment in the “list of unfortunate items we won’t be able to re-sell at the store” are:

Instructional Product Manuals

Here is a lovely example in photographic form:

This is truly an unusable item. Not only is it not a book, but it is a pamphlet, for a Cooker-Deep Fryer that appears to be from the 1960s. You could search all of the Goodwills in AMERICA and most likely never find this fryer to make this pamphlet relevant to you.

Now, I understand there are recipes that may be of interest to someone in this handy instructional pamphlet, but when I opened it up, the first recipe I saw was for CODFISH BALLS.

I think that is really all that needs to be said.
Next up: Stalker Guides.

I loved the infrastructure of school — arranging the semester schedule, color-coding notebooks and folders, skipping ahead on the syllabus, and so on. And I well know the moment of mental anguish at the end of each semester when, faced with a big stack of heavy and now-inapplicable textbooks, the guilt at getting rid of them vies with the inconvenience of keeping them around. There are few things so sad as a used textbook for a course you are no longer taking. But that sadness multiplies a thousandfold when we get boxes of them, many decades-old and festooned with marginal notes, which we cannot sell. No textbooks, please. Really.

Next Up: Following the instructions.