'Big Book Sale' Debuts Wednesday; Literary Fiends May Already Be Lining Up

Book sale! Book sale! Book sale!

​The Friends of the San Francisco Public Library will Today commence its annual gargantuan book sale/social experiment on how insane people can possibly get about buying discount tomes.

More than half a million books -- that'd be five big-rig loads -- are up for grabs at Fort Mason starting at 10 a.m. tomorrow at the aptly named Big Book Sale. Literary aficionados fly to San Francisco for this event; the behavior of shoppers has been compared to the game show Supermarket Sweep.

This year's sale is expected to be bigger -- and more lucrative -- than last year's. Upwards of 100,000 more books are on sale, for one thing (There was no mid-year sale this year). Also, staff will be replenishing books, DVDs, and other items throughout the sale, which lasts until Sunday. That way, by the end, you may yet find more than technical manuals for WordPerfect or Clan of the Cave Bear novels.

No item ever costs more than five bucks, and everything is a dollar on Sunday. Last year's event raised $265,000 for the library. Obviously, hopes are higher this year.



Friends of the Library spokeswoman Katie Ambellan said any books left over at the end of it all that staff don't think would sell at a future dollar sale -- and that's saying something -- will be sent to the Internet Archive. These guidebooks for archaic technology and other striking works of literature will then be scanned onto the Internet as "cultural artifacts."

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