Reader's Delight

WASILLA – Pam Ockerlander is a book lover’s book lover, and the twice-a-year bibliographic bonanza she runs for the Friends of Wasilla Library is a book lover’s book sale.

Inside the cavernous, fluorescent-lit banquet hall at the Wasilla American Legion Susitna Valley Post 35, three rows of card tables are laid end-to-end, each roughly the distance needed to gain a first down in football. Hemmed in by the room’s unplugged dart boards and dark big-screen television, all the tables are covered in tidy rows of books, with neat little placards placed here and there to separate the dozens of categories. Romance…Biography…Travel…Performing Arts. On closer inspection, the laminated paper signs are each slightly different, each with a computer-printed font chosen to reflect its section’s subject matter: “Poetry” is written in a spare, cool Courier, while “Performing Arts” is a playful Comic Sans.

“Most book sales aren’t like this,” Ockerlander says.

By that she means organized. Clean. Efficient. The sale starts with a sneak preview for Friends members on Thursday night, then gets rolling Friday morning with a crush of early birds looking to hit the literary mother lode. Ockerlander and her fellow volunteers start with almost 15,000 books and by the time the five-bucks-a-bag sales roll around Monday and Tuesday only a couple thousand will be left. Any leftovers are donated to Value Village, which donates a portion of its proceeds to the Boys and Girls Club.

“It really works out,” she says.

Over the past dozen or so years, the nonprofit Friends organization has netted more than $50,000, all of which has gone to help fund the city’s new library.

And there are lots of gems to be had. Priced at $0.50 each for paperbacks and a buck for hard covers, how could there not be? Ockerlander – who ran a bookstore for 23 years – gets almost giddy when asked to point out some of the bargains left on the tables Friday afternoon.

“Incredible book,” she says, grabbing a historical fiction set in 16^th century Malta. “Bloody. Very bloody.”

Ockerlander seems to have read almost everything, a holdover trait from her days as a bookseller.

“You cannot talk about books with customers unless I had read them,” she says.

Deftly dodging curious customers with her nimble bookseller’s toes, Ockerlander snatches up another title, then another. She thumbs through a wooden boat restoration guide, her eyes gleaming with the possibilities contained within.

“For the Alaskan? Oh, incredible book. For the people who want to get that old boat and fix it up,” she says, setting the how-to guide precisely where she got it and grabbing a textbook about helicopter safety.

Next she picks up “Dog Days: Dispatches from Bedlam Farms,” a book of essays about life on the farm.

“Wonderful stories,” Ockerlander says wistfully. “Who would not go for that?”

Some of the books end up at the book sale through donations, others are discarded by the library.

Sales run for five days in the spring and fall. The rest of the year, the books accumulate in a storage space or sit in the library’s discard pile, where they wait for Ockerlander to roll by twice a year and haul them off in preparation for the biannual sales. The first thing she does is unload the whole mess at her house.

“I pick ‘em up from both places and I sort them in my garage,” Oekerlander says.

Every one of ‘em? asks a reporter.

“Every single one.”

Of those books, about a third end up heading off to be shelved by the big librarian in the sky; some are too damaged to sell, others are hopelessly out of date. Those end getting recycled.

“You can’t keep those old books around, everything changes so quickly,” she said.

It pains her to throw away books, but Ockerlander said the book sale prides itself on quality.

“There’s not a lot of junk,” she says.

The rest Ockerlander carefully categorizes and places back in boxes awaiting transport by a moving company en masse before the sale. Getting to pack and unpack the books gives Ockerlander first dibs on anything that comes through.

It’s a perk that she earns the hard way. She estimates she picks up and puts down each of the 400-plus, 35-pound boxes about three times each by the time the books are closed on the sale.

“That’s a lot of weight I’m lifting every year,” she says before quickly giving a shout-out to the fitness program at the Wasilla Senior Center.

“Let me give a plug for the StrongWomen program over at the senior center,” she says, crediting the regimen with giving her the strength needed to move around up to 400 boxes of books per sale. “It helps a lot.”

Ockerlander is quick to point out that she’s not a one-woman show. The Friends enlist dozens of volunteers to help with the sale, sharing the work of setting up tables, packing and unpacking books, staffing the check-out stand and keeping things running smooth.

“There’s a lot of work that goes into it,” she says.

Customers come back to the sale year after year – spring and fall – attracted by the huge selection of like-new tomes. On Friday afternoon there was a steady crowd, a mix of young and old, men and women and children, all brought together by their shared love of the written word; apparently, the medium isn’t dead yet.

“There were even more here this morning,” she says.

Bibliophiles on Friday pored over the rows, filling their arms with stacks of historical romances, young adult novels or sci-fi thrillers. The Littau family – mom Heather and kids Ryan, 10, Heidi, 8, and Cody, 6 – cleaned up at the sale, the eldest boy leaving the makeshift store with at dozen books piled in his arms like a load of firewood.

“They’re all good books,” Ryan explains with a grin, his hands gripping an adventure story by Robert Louis Stevenson, among others.

Heidi says she planning to read her stack of “American Girl” books “today.”

Her mom is more specific.

“It’ll be as soon as they get in the car,” she says.

Like many frequent visitors to the book sale, the Littaus also donate used books to the Friends, ensuring a steady flow of books is available for each sale.

“It goes in a big circle,” Heather said.

The family makes a point of swinging by the American Legion post located a block off the Parks Highway each time the big arrow signs show up alongside the road pointing toward Tweed Court in Meadow Lakes.

“We come every single time and it’s just fun,” she says.

That kind of enthusiasm for reading is what makes it easy to volunteer at the book sale year after year, Ockerlander said.

“I’m a book lover, I’ll always be around books,” she says. “And for me this was a perfect match to come and do this. I love the library, it’s so important. Knowledge changes your life.”

The Friends of Wasilla Library Used Book Sale continues Sunday from noon to 6 p.m., Monday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Tuesday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Contact Frontiersman editor Matt Tunseth at 352-2268 or matt.tunseth@frontiersman.com