posted on 25 Jun 2019

Books For Good, Fletcher, North Carolina

As you can probably imagine, at the Letterpress Project we’re no strangers to the idea of book projects to aid charitable causes and, as a consequence, we were delighted to discover Books For Good on Heritage Park Drive in Fletcher, North Carolina.

This is a project that relies on donations of books that it then sells in order to distribute funds to a whole range of charities in the local area - their newsletter tells me that they serve 105 different charities, secular and religious. I continue to find it astonishing just how many books there are out there that people want to donate to good causes – sometimes when you’re appealing for books in this way the sheer numbers can be overwhelming. I note that Books For Good seem to be having that problem too because their newsletter also tells me:

“We have reached capacity in our storage units and must place a temporary hold on donations until we get caught up on processing.”

If you go along to their shop (it’s a pretty big industrial-type unit) you can help relieve them of some of their load. The volunteers do a great job because the shop is well kept, logically ordered and has something for every interest. There’s not a lot of what you might think of as collectables in the sense of unusual or rare books – these are donations after all – but what goes onto the shelves is bright, clean and sensibly priced.

Hardback fiction is kept separate from paperback (something I’m grateful for) and the children’s section is well stocked. Perhaps my one quibble with the organisation is that the children’s books could be better kept – they are stacked in batches based on alphabetical titles which I think makes systematic searching by author pretty difficult.

But that’s a small quibble and we came away with a healthy little haul of stuff which didn’t break the bank.

All good – so get out there and support the project if you happen to be in the vicinity.

 

Terry Potter

June 2019