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On Monday, April 19 and Tuesday, April 20, members of Axe Library’s Library Services hosted a book sale featuring collections of genre-specific books in blind grab bags. Each bag carried a variety of books in a particular genre or occasionally by a specific author. This meant three to five books per bag and prices ranging from one to three dollars. Jorge Leon, learning and outreach librarian for Axe Library, said he wanted to get more books into students’ hands.
“Axe Library and this part of Axe Library, Library Services, tries to have a sale every year,” Leon said.
“Last year we weren’t able to, but we try to make an activity where we can engage with our students, staff, and community to give back. A lot of the materials we have here are all donations, so this is a way for us to help get more books in the hands of readers and help us fund some of our (other) programming.”
Robert Lindsey, Axe Library’s public service librarian, takes pride in displaying the various books for the community and indulging in some of his favorite genres.
“I like organizing the books,” Lindsey said, “and I like both history and mystery.”
The bags created for the sale spanned a wide variety of genres and topics, from self-help books to
science-fiction fantasy, young adult to poetry. As an example of the type of variety curated in each bag, a sack obtained of books in the “ancient literature” genre consisted of the following titles: Hercules: The Complete Myths of a Legendary Hero, The Oedipus Cycle by Sophocles, The Letters of the Younger Pliny, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Old Celtic Romances, a wide variety of time periods and literature for the mere price of two dollars. Other bags obtained included the complete works of both Lord Byron and William Wordsworth as well as Rick Riordan’s The Red Pyramid and The Titan’s Curse. With at least one hundred bags spanning the tables both inside and outside the Axe Library lobby, the librarians of Library Services aimed to ensure a positive experience for any patron.
English department graduate student Ellie Davis attended the sale and found some interesting finds for her collection.
“I bought two dollars of Agatha Christie mysteries and two dollars of westerns,” Davis said. “So, I’m
supposed to be reading for my comps this summer, and I will be doing that, but I’ll also be interspersing some Agatha Christie and westerns by various authors into the mix.”
Like Davis, Jorge Leon has been reading works in the western genre and a variety of others.
“I’m kind of all over the place,” Leon said. “I have some westerns now that I’m reading, I have some
poetry that I am reading, so I’m a little bit all over the place.”
In addition to the book sale, Axe Library is hosting a virtual sustainability scavenger hunt during the
week of April 18-24 and distributing DIY pollinator kits in order to celebrate both sustainability and this year’s Earth Day.
