For many years I’ve been making a twice a year round trip of 460 miles to a university town of about 17,000 people in Minnesota for their semi-annual AAUW book sale.

The sale has never had a preview and always starts at 10:00 Friday morning. I usually leave early Thursday morning and poke around the antique shops and malls between here and there. I stay overnight in a motel, grab breakfast in the morning, and if I’m in line by 8:00 there are usually roughly 10 to 20 people in line ahead of me. By the time the doors open at 10:00 there are 200 plus people waiting in line to get in.

They always have between 25,000 and 35,000 books with nearly all of them priced between $.50 and $1.00. If they feel they have something special, it gets priced at $2.00. Most years this is one of the three most productive book sales I go to.
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The local chapter of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) is having their annual book sale this Friday and Saturday.

The sale is always located in the middle of the main corridor of one of our local shopping malls. Because of the large number of books to be put out each year, the ladies from the AAUW always start setting up for the sale Thursday morning and enforce a strict policy of “no sales” until the sale begins at 10:00 Friday Morning.

I have a friend named John, a retired school teacher, who has been selling books on Amazon for the last few years as a way to supplement his retirement income. John’s wife sent him to the mall shortly after it opened Thursday morning to pick up something for her. On his way out of the mall, hoping to scope-out the location of a few good books, he asked one of the two women there if he could “just look” at what they had out.

Her response was, “Go right ahead. If you find any you are interested in, buy them. We’re here to sell them.”

“I can buy them now?”, he responded.

“Buy all you want”, she replied.

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