Every event has a story behind it, whether it’s an annual tradition, a drive to raise funds or just a desire to have a good time. When it comes to the vintage book sale that starts Tuesday at the Southwest Branch Library, it is a story of love.
Its main characters are sisters who want to share their grandmother’s love of books with the community and the passionate volunteers of the Friends of the Southwest Branch who support the Ming Avenue library.
The nonprofit has around 162 members, with a smaller group of 10 that handles the upkeep of a book sale room in the library, which is restocked with new donations daily.
“We do it and we love it. It’s a lot of work,” volunteer Maria Aebi said of the sorting and pricing of donations.
“It’s unbelievable, the number of books that come in.”
Donations have been on the rise since the pandemic started as people cleared out their homes where they were spending more time.
The latest windfall for the Friends actually came in 2019 when a woman came into a large collection of books after her grandmother passed away.
Around Christmastime, Marilyn Fritz came into the branch with a trunkload of books, just a fraction of the collection her grandmother Eleanor Julia Hall had collected over decades.
“We had hoped to be able to do a feature sale as part of a big sale,” said Ginger Lane, another longtime Friends volunteer and the group’s co-vice president with her husband, Jim.
(Pre-pandemic, the group would host three large sales a year, along with the book sale room.)
“She had given us some books, many from the 1930s and 1940s, mostly fiction, with absolutely delightful dust covers that were intriguing for that period.”
When Hall’s Wright Avenue home was up for sale, Fritz had more books to donate so the Lanes came over to see what was available.
“It was a small little home in Oildale,” Lane said. “We got a little tour, and there was a combination room of Grandma Eleanor’s library and her husband’s (Jim) workshop. Her husband had loved her so dearly, he built bookshelves around the entire room.”
That room was referred to as the den, said Alana Messenger, Fritz’s sister. Grandpa Hall had converted what may have been a one-car garage into the space with room enough for books and eventually a sewing room, where Hall made doll clothes for her granddaughters and costumes for her youngest grandchild, Pat. (“She needed these outfits. She had a vivid imagination,” Messenger said of her cousin.)
Hall was “a stay-at-home mother and grandmother” and “when the kids were at school, she had time to read,” Messenger said.
Messenger doesn’t remember reading any books from her grandmother’s collection but recalls her sister and mother were both avid readers.
She said among Hall’s reading interests were some “safari-type stories, outdoor stories, not necessarily cowboy stories.”
Aebi said the collection includes plenty of fiction, classics from the 1940s and 1950s and “lots of books about women.”
“We got an impression she might have been a feminist.”
Hall also helped out with the family business, Guy E. Hall Construction (started by Joseph’s older brother), cooking for crews on some job sites and for employee barbecues they hosted in their backyard.
Messenger said she has a lot of good memories from growing up down the street from her grandparents.
“We were no special family of any kind, but we were a close family.”
And now the community has a chance to share in some of that history. The Lanes were able to bring out the 30 bankers boxes of books from Hall’s home that they had stored in their garage for a year and a half while the library was closed.
The Friends of the Southwest Branch have been busy sorting and organizing the books for sale.
Books are priced mostly in the $1 to $3 range. The sale begins Tuesday and will continue as long as there is interest in the vintage collection, with the stack replenished in the book sale room as books sell.
As early as this spring, the nonprofit also hopes to resume the larger book sales, which are held in the branch’s auditorium.
“We’re bursting at the seams with donations,” Aebi said of planning a big sale. “We’re making sure we have enough volunteers to run it.”
Stefani Dias can be reached at 661-395-7488. Follow her on Twitter: @realstefanidias.
