Some arrive in clutched hands held close to the chest, and others in long-forgotten dusty boxes. No matter how a donation arrives at the Book Barn, it is welcomed by a team of volunteers who hand-sort each treasure into one of 54 categories, then group the books by size and carefully pack them into boxes. This meticulous work continues year-round until all 70,000 or so are sorted, priced and stacked in towering piles destined for the annual Friends of the LSU Libraries (FOLL) Book Bazaar held each spring. There, the secondhand books are transformed into vital financial support for LSU Libraries.
This year, FOLL is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Book Bazaar, a highly anticipated event that draws a crowd on opening day reminiscent of Black Friday in the early aughts. To date, the volunteer-powered used book sale has raised more than $2.75 million in total, directly resulting in the acquisition of rare materials, including The Kelmscott Chaucer (1896), sixteenth-century Mattioli woodblocks and the cash journal of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, all of which are used for research, instruction and public programming.
“Readers are just very special people,” FOLL vice president and longtime volunteer Anita Adams says, noting that many visitors stop simply to take in the smell. “If you’re not a reader, you don’t really get it. But if you are, we don’t even have to explain it.”
The FOLL organization was founded in 1962, and its work on the Book Bazaar has continued quietly yet consistently since 1976, when the first Book Bazaar was held as a modest flea market sale in the LSU Union, raising $500. Within a few years, the effort expanded dramatically, outgrowing the original sorting area in the basement of Hill Memorial Library and the Main Library, before it moved into its home at the Book Barn in LSU’s Warehouse District on River Road…