Dennis Belliveau was up a ladder, hanging signs Thursday. After nine years volunteering for the Times Colonist Book Sale, he doesn’t need to look at a map to know which categories go where: hardcover fiction, gardening, hobbies, romance …
Stringing up signs in the cavernous Victoria Curling Club is one of those jobs best done before they bring in the 350 begged-and-borrowed trestle tables that will hold the books. The first 200 tables are in now, thanks to David McConachie and the City of Victoria, and the municipality of Esquimalt’s Chris Millan, who freed up a bunch from the Archie Browning Sports Centre. The final allotment will come from CFB Esquimalt, one of the longtime sponsors who help make the book sale happen.
Others who step up: Fairway Markets lends shopping carts for the volunteers to use when moving books around, Telus puts in phone lines for the point-of-sale machines, Thrifty Foods feeds the volunteers during the two-week sorting period while Serious Coffee and Canadian Springs quench their thirst. Emterra Environmental comes up with giant recycling bins, the Boston Pizza on Hillside helps out. …
You get the idea. The name might be the Times Colonist Book Sale but a lot of people who have nothing to do with the TC make it possible, none of them more important than the hundreds of volunteers like Belliveau who show up for the grunt work. This is the 20th anniversary of the book drive, and some of those volunteers have shown up for every single one.
All the money raised goes to education and literacy projects on Vancouver Island. Last year’s sale also triggered a $127,000 contribution from the provincial government via Decoda Literacy Solutions, allowing the Times Colonist Literacy Society to distribute $308,000 to 152 recipients (most of them schools) this year.
That brought the running total since 1998 to just over $5 million, thanks to the volunteers, sponsors, donors and buyers of books.
By now, you know how it goes: Readers donate good-quality used books, which volunteers sort for resale to the public. As has been the case since 2010, both the book collection and book sale will be held at the Victoria Curling Club at 1952 Quadra St.
The drive-through book drop-off will be this Saturday and Sunday, from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. both days. If you want to donate, please pack books in boxes or bags that you don’t want back. No encyclopedias, textbooks, magazines, medical books, outdated reference works, Reader’s Digest condensed books or National Geographics, please.
It would be greatly appreciated if the boxes were small enough to be lifted by the volunteers, many of whom are either retirees whose backs are beyond their best-before date or Times Colonist employees who have no spines at all (journalists generally don’t lift anything heavier than a pint).
The lineup for the drop-off can be long, so you might want to give yourself a bit of extra time. Once on site, it will go more smoothly if you follow traffic directions and stay in your vehicle as the volunteers empty it of books (and, possibly, your groceries, golf clubs and any loose children). Please don’t enter from Caledonia Avenue; not only will you find yourself like a salmon swimming upstream but the Victoria police need to use that lane.
The book sale itself will take place Saturday, May 5, and Sunday, May 6, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day.
On the Monday after the sale, schools and non-profit groups may take away as many of the unsold books as they like, for free.
