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----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Greetings, I posted a couple messages last fall regarding library book sales, and received a number of helpful responses (thank you) and some requests for more information on "how we did it." Here are results and logistics from our experience. We had a huge one day sale last October, open to all museum staff and docents. We held it on a Monday, when the library (and museum) are closed to the public. I don't have a count of the number of books we had for sale, probably around 4,000. We didn't sell everything, in fact we probably sold about half, but we made over $3,000. It was very popular, quite busy for much of the day. We cut the prices in about half towards the end of the day, when there was about one hour left, and another big stream of people came in. Since we still had quite a bit leftover, we left it out, consolidated on a few tables and bookshelves, and opened the sale to the public (we have an art school across the street, and were flooded with art students buying the books for the next couple of weeks). After about 2 weeks we needed to get the books out of our reading room, so we boxed them up (we had about 12 bankers boxes left) and are donating them to a local public library. In terms of pricing, we developed a rather loose scheme, using 9 set prices ranging from $0.25 to $15.00, with some larger books over $15.00. Interestingly, quite a bit of the larger stuff did sell, and a lot of the little stuff was leftover (we then offered the smallest stuff for free -- please take this stuff off our hands!). We printed the prices on color-coded streamers (colored paper cut in long thin strips) and placed the streamers in the books. We didn't seem to have problems with people switching the streamers, and we didn't damage the books with sticky stuff. What I found most difficult was deciding which books to give which prices -- where is the line between a $2.00 and a $3.00 exhibition catalog? We decided not to go strictly with number of pages, so that we could take into account condition, subject interest, inclusion of color reproductions, etc. We had a lot of non-art books which we priced on a lower scale than the art books. Since we still have a lot of duplicate books, we have decided to run an on-going sale so that we won't have to go through the work of putting on a large sale (and it was a *lot* of work). We have one book truck full of sale books sitting in the reference area where patrons can look at them and buy them. We put new books on the truck each monday, so that museum staff have the first chance to buy the new books. We are using the same pricing scheme, except that for in-print books we are actually looking up the price and selling them at half the list price (we don't have too many of these.) We just started the sale yesterday, so I don't have an idea yet of how it will go, but it seems people are already buying. We are probably going to hold some books back to sell to dealers, when we think we can get a much better price from a dealer. Many of the books we're selling, however, have library stamps, barcodes, call numbers, etc., in them, and I'm inclined to think that dealers will not want them. Anyone have experience to the contrary? More than you ever wanted to know about our sale, eh? If you have more questions, I'd be happy to try to answer them. Kathy ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Kathy Mitchell Acquisitions Assistant Spencer Art Reference Library Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art 4525 Oak Street Kansas City, MO 64111-1873 (816) 751-0407 -- Fax (816) 561-7154 [log in to unmask] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~