Written by: Daniel Schutz
Every season, the Eagle Rock Yacht Club partners with a local organization as part of our league’s commitment to supporting the common good. This season, our Venice league volunteered at the Abbot Kinney Memorial Branch Library to help them run their quarterly book sale.
We arrived at the library early on a Saturday morning to find a line of locals waiting to shop the sale. Inside, Friends of Venice Library (FoVL) volunteers were busy organizing boxes of books, sneaking bites of donuts, and sipping coffee in between tasks.
FoVL volunteers Margaret, Max, and Linda gave us the rundown for the day and put us to work organizing books by genre, displaying them spine-side up, and consolidating them into boxes. With paperbacks for a dollar and most hardbacks for only two dollars, the sale made hundreds of books available to almost anyone who wanted them.
It was gratifying to see the eyes of casual browsers light up when they found a book they’d been wanting to read or came across something new that piqued their interest. Families roamed the aisles—parents looking for a casual read, while the kids picked out picture books or, in one case, a book of 100 jokes about chickens. Leisurely retirees took their time searching for the perfect book, reading blurbs and inspecting the books’ condition. Others went straight for the art and coffee table books, flipping through monographs on Monet, airplanes, Porsches, and Frank Lloyd Wright.
As the day wore on, we started talking amongst ourselves and then to customers and FoVL volunteers about our favorite books. Interests ranged from American history to graphic novels to poetry and cookbooks. Reshelved book by reshelved book and conversation by conversation, we built a new community of book lovers in the span of an afternoon.
By the end of the sale, we helped the library bring in about $2,400, all of which will be reinvested to serve the community. Not only that but we helped shorten their average sale break down time from four hours to only thirty minutes–a new record!
Though our spring season is over, the Eagle Rock Yacht Club can’t wait to continue building community and supporting the common good throughout Los Angeles in the seasons to come.
“Books invite all; they constrain none.”
– Hartley Burr Alexander
