A Port in the Storm: Boston Public Library Book Sale
Gray, drizzly weather calls for a trip to the library—and, by a stroke of pure luck, the City-Wide Friends of the Boston Public Library book sale took place on a horrendously damp day. The library was a glowing beacon of warmth, knowledge, and oversized lion statues in the midst of spitting rain.
I happily jogged up the stone steps to explore the sale’s contents. Following the soggy paper signs that merrily advertised the bimonthly sale, I wandered into an elevator and headed for the third floor. After a wrong turn into a reading room that must have been deadly silent for the past 15 years, I took a left at the two printing presses lurking in the hallway and emerged into a cathedral-like atrium. Despite the wholly secular environment of the library, the vaguely religious murals covering the ceiling did not feel particularly out of place. Rather, they complemented the near-evangelical enthusiasm of the book devotees in the room beyond the atrium.
I had brought a book-loving friend for company as we perused the stacks, but as it turned out, she was more of a sacrifice than a companion. Not a minute after we entered the book sale, I had lost sight of her glaringly red raincoat amidst the throngs of people and paperbacks, so I resigned myself to a solitary browsing experience.
In a space only slightly larger than a classroom, the organized chaos of the book sale provided a stark contrast to the elegant architecture and tidy information desks of the library itself. Walls were lined with shelves; countless tables were piled high with books; carts carried heaps of novels. The themes of these groupings were vague at best: I spotted shelves packed with garden-variety fiction, poetry, romance, and foreign-language books. The BGLTQ sections boasted a wide range of SAT prep books, and the “oldies” cart included some questionable selections like “Homemaking for Teenagers: Book 2 Revised” and “Tropical Holland.”
A shelf labeled “browsing” boasted an even more diverse variety than its fellows, containing not only Nicholas Campion’s “The Practical Astrologer” but also the “Great Book of Baseball Cards,” the ever-helpful “Freshwater Fish and River Creatures” guide, and “You Are Being Lied To.”
Strange categorical choices aside, the book sale was the literary equivalent of going thrifting: You can find something specific if you’re willing to put in the effort, but it’s far more fun to see what you stumble upon. Most patrons of the book sale shared this mindset. I noticed several shopping baskets (provided by Shaw’s) filled to the brim. While some of those baskets centered around a theme (I spied a dangerous number of romance novels in one), most were eclectic collections.
The same can be said of the book sale’s clientele. Teenagers, parents with young children, elderly women, and bewildered-looking people who might have been lost perused the stacks of books together. College students were particularly frequent patrons—it’s hard to beat $1 paperbacks and $2 hardcovers, after all.
Indeed, the charm of the book sale lay as much in the discovery as it did in the hunt. I have no justification for buying books, but I’m now the proud owner of a glossy-paged tome of Mary Cassatt’s feathery Impressionist paintings. The works of one of my favorite artists take on a distinctly more personal quality when bound in a green fabric hardcover rather than in frames on museum walls. A stamp on the endpapers states that the book is “no longer the property of the Boston Public Library,” so I knew that I should give it a new home.