Phil Kauper stands around 6-feet tall, but he is barely visible as he sorts through the high stacks of boxes filled with thousands of books in the downtown library’s basement. Kauper is a volunteer for the Friends of the Beaumont Public Library and the boxes are sorted onto hardback fiction, paperback fiction, nonfiction, cookbooks and children’s books.
The group will hold a “Sack of Books” sale, April 5 and 6 in the downtown library’s basement. Visitors will be able to purchase a paper grocery sack for $2 and fill it with as many books as will fit. There is no limit to the number of bags. Members of the Friends of the Library will get a head start from 3 to 6 p.m., April 5. Memberships, which cost $10 for an individual and $20 for a family, may be purchased at the door. General admission is 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., April 6.
Friends of the Beaumont Public Library president Elaine Wikstrom said the book sale raises funds to assist the library with its community outreach.
“We almost always pay for the T-shirts for the summer reading program,” she said. “Anything that comes up that’s not covered. We’re going to talk about whether or not we need to help them with a canopy, because the library is doing so much more outside event work. They’re doing a whole lot more outreach.
“(The library’s) needs change from time to time, and whenever they have something that they can’t cover, or that’s not in the budget already, they come to us. I don’t think we’ve ever turned them down.”
The paper sacks are donated by H-E-B. Last year, the Friends of the Library sold more than 1,000 bags, with many people buying 10 bags at a time.
Paul Eddy is director for the Beaumont Public Library System. He said the sale not only raises funds but also is valuable for clearing out space. People donate books to the library system — The Miller Library alone receives up to 20 boxes a week — with donations coming from estates or garage sales or from people who buy the newest bestseller and donate it as soon as they’ve read it. The library itself also has to make sure its collection is current and manageable.
“This library, when I got here 15 years ago, was probably close to 450,000 items,” he said. “We’re down to around 350,000 now. We’ve probably gotten that many items off the shelves, but you could go to the shelf and find a nursing text or telephone information that was way out of date. So, (the sale) helps us. We try not to throw away a lot of books but most anything can come to the book sale. You’d be very surprised how many people will still buy a book even though it’s got a little bit of a rip on the cover or something like that.”
During the sale, the books will be arranged by category on tables throughout the library’s basement halls. However, there is a separate room for the children’s books, which is the most popular room.
“Our children’s area is just insane,” Eddy said. “You have the new teacher that comes in that’s been told, you’re not getting any funding for your classroom, you’ve got to take it out of your own pocket. You have them coming in and they’re going through every book in the children’s area, and they basically just wipe it off into a bag. Then you have grandma that brings the kids, and they just want to come and get some books.”
Wikstrom said she looks at the sale as the ultimate recycling project.
“It heartens me to know that there are people who still want books in their physical form because, you know, they’ve predicted the death of the book every year for years, and they’re not dead,” she said.
Being able to see the children’s books being recycled is particularly gratifying, Wikstrom said.
“I think of some of the people that shop children’s books, or the daycares — even if it’s a used book from the library collection, it’s going to get hard to use in that sort of environment, because you’ve got a lot of children,” she said. “It helps them help the children, because we want them reading.”
This is the first book sale since November 2022, and the only sale this year. As a 501c3 nonprofit, the Friends of the Library do not charge tax, so they are limited to one sale a year.
As well as the fiction and nonfiction, Wikstrom said visitors can buy reference sets of encyclopedias, law books and medical texts. She pointed out a 10-volume collection of contemporary literary criticism. They also have a mixed media section with everything from vinyl records to CDs to cassette tapes, and VHS cassettes to DVDs.
Eddy is a second-generation librarian whose father worked at a university as a medical librarian.
“I went to work with him all the time and that’s when I learned to love books and to love the information,” he said. “Not a lot of fiction in medical libraries, so I saw some really gruesome books, but it fascinated me. It means learning, knowledge and the ability to make your way in life.”
Community outreach, which the fundraiser helps support, is an important part of the library system’s mission, Eddy said.
“Several years ago, we did a program called Books and Bikes, and the city was running the Summer Food Program in the parks,” he said. “We would take boxes of children’s books out to the parks, and let kids choose a book. Here was this young lady, maybe 6 or 7, and she came in she looked through a box of books and she took one. She came back and handed it to me, and I said, ‘Why, do you not want this one?’ (She said) Oh yeah, she wanted that. And I said, ‘Well, you can keep it, and she didn’t understand that first. And her eyes got about this big around. She said, ‘I’ve never had a book.’
“So, what do books mean to me? It means that child may have had a book by their bed and been able read and to learn and to grow, and to become a member of our society. That’s what it means to me as a librarian.”
The downtown library is located at 801 Pearl St. in Beaumont.
This story first ran in the March 24, 2024 Art of Living section of The Beaumont Enterprise.
English with a bit of Texas 