books for sale!

Fact: volunteering at a library book sale is the best volunteer position ever. So maybe it's not quite as useful for humanity as starting a women's shelter or flying to Haiti... but hey, you get to help save (and read!) books... and in my books (ahaha, see what I did there) that's a definite bonus. (Basically, as thanks, you're allowed to take as many books as you want. SCORE.)

...and there were a lot of books.

(and this is only half the room!) 

Since there weren't nearly as many people, I basically wandered around straightening and... reading. (So, again, this is my dream job. Is there any way I can be paid for this?) Along the way, I found some pretty amusing titles...

• Cabbagetown Gang (obviously a group of tough guys who run around wearing cabbage-leaf hats)
• Cooking With Ferret (is Ferret someone's nickname, or does it literally mean eating ferrets? I was too scared to check)
• Farmageddon (here I imagine strawberries the size of nuclear bombs) 
• Start and Run a Profitable Gift-Basket Business (...but really though. REALLY.)
• Methane- Planning a Digester (...I don't even want to think what kind of instructions this gives)
• The Hamster Revolution (no need to worry about the zombie apocalypse- hamsters are demanding their rights! Or maybe it's zombie hamsters?) 
• ABCs for Angry Men (A is for Anger! R is for Rage! and so on)

Not all of my experience was fun and games, however. All of the remaining books (which was well over half) were set to be... recycled.

-insert horrified books here-

As someone who is addicted to reading, and who wants to be published one day herself, the thought of so many words being crushed is devastating. Perhaps they'll give new life to other stories... but the fact remains that someone's craft is being destroyed because it's unwanted... and isn't that every writer's worst fear? (Other than starving to death because you can't even get published.) My one hope is that, whatever objects they go on to make, those objects will be imbued with a certain essence de book- and will encourage whoever holds them to go find something to read, and fast.