5-29-2026

Memorial Day weekend is about remembering, saying thank you, and in East Troy finding good deals. The Saturday of Memorial Day weekend tends to be one of the longest days of my year, but so worth it. 

This year marked the Friends of the ETLPL’s fourth annual Books ‘N Bites. They really hit their stride. Set up is a lot of work as the voluntold husbands will attest. They start setting up canopies and tables at 7:30 followed by hauling the books and baked goods out to the side yard. Three years was enough experience to find ways to make the day go smoother and more profitable.

The first change was to set out a baking sign up sheet at the beginning of the month. We had at least a dozen patrons added to our regular bakers list. Since the books are priced so low, this is where I suspect most of the profits come in. Thank you to all who contributed. The second major change was having several people begin prep on Friday afternoon pulling books out of storage and organizing them for the trip outside. We try to keep them organized over the course of the year, but anything stuffed into a storage room, they seem to multiply and scurry into crevices on their own. 

This year’s sale started slow at the weather was iffy, and I think shoppers may have learned books are heavy. They should be purchased on the way home. The end result was the best sales year ever at $1024 and the two boxes of Star Trek books finding a forever home at the last moment. 

The first two years of this sale, we kept all the books for the next year. Last year we kept all the fiction. This year we kept very few as some of those books have been around for all four sales and we only need so many Danielle Steel paperbacks and copies of Grisham’s The Firm. 

Last year’s nonfiction and the majority of this year’s remaining books were donated to an Illinois organization called SCARCE: School & Community Assistance for Recycling and Composting Education. They will go through the donation, select books they feel will find a home to save and properly recycle the rest. The saved books will be added to their own book sale/fundraiser giving them another chance to be read and us room for a new selection. 

Which means we are happy to accept new donations of books at anytime. The single day book sale raises significant funds, but the every day book sale in our entry averages $50 in sales per month brining the total around $1600/year. That’s roughly the cost of our three Friends sponsored experience passes. Give the $.50-$1.00 price tags, a lot of books finding new homes.  

Reading Now: The Shack by William Paul Young

Listening to Now: A Midwive’s Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich