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Email to FriendMILWAUKEE: All Saints' Cathedral sells thousands of books to alleviate hunger
This year, the 27th annual Great Hunger Book Sale begins on July 31, with more than 40,000 used books filling the Guild Hall dining room, library, hallways, a Sunday school classroom, and several steps leading to second-floor offices. Sunday's coffee hour is relegated to the kitchen. If previous years' sales are any indication, about $25,000 will have been raised by the last day, August 4, for local, national, and international food pantries, meal programs, and disaster relief.
Everything is donated. All year long, orphans books appear on the cathedral's steps: bags and boxes of used books brought by parishioners, friends, neighbors of the historic downtown church, who've cleaned out their personal libraries and book shelves. Larger consignments, from bookstores and libraries, schools, retiring individuals moving to more compact quarters, are picked up by volunteers. These thousands of volumes are sorted and priced in basement book rooms, eventually boxed and toted upstairs, to be arranged in very loose categories on every available surface. The last few years the sale has accepted CDs and DVDs, cassettes and videos.
Admission is charged on the first evening. Booksellers and bibliophiles eager for the best selection, ante up their $5 and dash to their favorite corners: fiction, general non-fiction, religion, the arts, and foreign-language books. There is a special corner for children's books, and kids sprout in corners and under tables, perusing a Goosebumps or a Curious George. Romance novels go for $1 each; rare books – first editions, signed volumes, antique volumes - are specially priced.
Volunteers in purple shirts staff the checkout tables, circulate to answer questions and guide first-time book lovers, straighten and restock tables. And of course, buy books themselves. Fascinating conversations take place around those tables. Soon, dedicated readers are found in quiet niches or on the garden benches, already deep into new treasures.
On Wednesday all books left are boxed up and taken to various sites around the city: the Salvation Army rehab center, Goodwill, the Central Library's coffee-and-book shop. Established programs such as prison ministries or the USO arrange for free books. A Jewish food pantry scoops up all the Harlequins; their patrons love getting a little romance with their peanut butter and Cheerios.
This year's sale will feature a Saturday afternoon organ concert in the church. The Methodist church on the next corner in this downtown neighborhood of churches always has its annual ice cream social on the same weekend.
After all earnings are documented, including any rare volumes sold on eBay, the sale committee will meet to plan distribution of the proceeds. Last year, money was donated to two food pantries and two city meal sites, a shelter for women and children, an after-school homework-help program, Milwaukee AIDS Project, the Salvation Army, the Ecumenical Refugee Council, and Episcopal Relief and Development.
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