Dave Obee is editor and publisher of the Times Colonist.
If you’ve been to Stonehenge, love taking photos of your children and dropped off boxes at the Times Colonist book drive last weekend, we should talk.
If you’ve misplaced your family Bible — you know, the huge old ones, with room in the front for family details — again, we should talk. Assuming you were at our book drive, at least.
If your name is Alasdair, or if you know someone named Alasdair, we have some VHS tapes you might want back. If you were at our book drive, that is.
See a trend here?
Every year our readers donate thousands of boxes and bags of books that they no longer want. (They also toss in books that we don’t want, as well as CDs, records, DVDs, board games and a few other things, but that’s another story.)
As our volunteers go through boxes, sorting books for the big sale on May 4 and 5, they find items that families probably did not want to give to our book drive.
So every year, we try to get these mistaken donations back to the people who dropped them off.
One year, we were given the cremains of a cat in a neat little container. I kept that for about a decade, mentioning it every year, hoping that someone would claim it. Nobody did.
When we find a mistake, the first step is to look for clues about who the owner might have been.
Then we publish a column such as this to mention what we’ve found. So here goes:
• There are three photo albums. A visit to Stonehenge! Lots and lots of photos of kids. At least one boy and one girl. Happy parents.
• There are about a dozen videotapes with Alasdair written on some of them. (No, I haven’t watched them.)
• One large Bible has a bunch of entries for people named Hickman. Another is signed George and Mary Simpson, and there is a reference to a missionary named Robert Phair.
• We also have some family photos accompanied by a letter written about 30 years ago. Hint: Someone named Dennis had a brother named Gerald.
Please send an email to me — [email protected] — if any of these items sounds familiar. If you want them back, we will do what we can. If you don’t want them back, we can dispose of them.
If we get stuck and can’t find the owner, we will turn the items over to the Victoria Genealogical Society. Melanie Arscott leads a small team of eager volunteers who just love solving mysteries.
Back at the curling club, about 100 volunteers are busy sorting books, getting them ready for the big sale on May 4 and May 5.
A few thousand people will line up to buy those books, with proceeds going to literacy organizations and school libraries. We’ve raised and given almost $7 million since our first sale in 1998.
The Times Colonist provides organizational help and publicity for the sale. It’s all made possible by our readers who donate and buy books, as well as our volunteers. A more dedicated bunch would be hard to imagine.
They are still opening boxes and are still finding things that should not have been donated. So expect a follow-up column in a couple of days.
The book sale takes place on Saturday, May 4 from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday, May 5 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the curling club at 1952 Quadra St.
For more information, or to make a donation to the Times Colonist Literacy Society, go to tcreads.ca.
