80,000 Books for Sale

The gymnasium at Princeton Day School is filled with long tables of books. Cookbooks. Art. Military History. Architecture. Biography. Philosophy. Math. Fiction.

There are books everywhere, but they're organized into dozens of categories that make it easy to find just about anything you might be searching for. 

The cookbook section alone features the classics: The Silver Palate Cookbook, The Moosewood Cookbook, The Joy of Cooking and The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, plus countless copies of those featuring household names including James Beard, Jacques Pepin, Martha Stewart and Julia Child. 

This is the 81st year of the Bryn Mawr-Wellesley Book Sale, which raises money to offer scholarships to students from central New Jersey who attend either of the two all-women colleges. The sale is independent, but the proceeds go to the college's active alumni clubs in the area. 

The sale opened on Wednesday. The hours for the rest of the week are Friday 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Books are half price on Saturday and $10 per box of books on Sunday. 

The sale was in jeopardy last year after floods from Hurricane Irene ruined thousands of books stored by Peddie Lake. But residents came to the rescue with donations and the books, well, they just flooded in, said book sale organizer Fran Reichl of Princeton. 

She said the annual book sale might be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, on the East Coast.

The group hopes to clear $50,000, net of expenses, by the time the sale ends on Sunday. 

Nona Henderson of East Brunswick is a Wellesley College graduate who has been volunteering with the book sale for more than a dozen years. She said the book sale proceeds go into endowments at the two colleges and yield about $24,000 worth of scholarships each year for students from Central New Jersey. 

The books on sale are either individually priced or sell for default pricing: $1 for small paperbacks, $2 for large paperbacks and hardcover books. More expensive and rare books typically sell for about a quarter of the price they might fetch on the open market, Henderson said. 

"Often these books are sitting on someone's shelves for 30 or 40 years and now we're the recipient of that gift and it's quite extraordinary," she said. 

All of the books in the sale are donations, collected year round and sorted by volunteers and one employee, Bryn Mawr graduate Sarah Ferguson, in a barn located behind 32 Vandeventer Avenue in Princeton. Donations resume on March 28 between 10 a.m. and noon on Wednesdays and Saturdays. 

Dr. Bill Tate, a retired internist from the Princeton Medical Group, helps organize the sale's medical books and also collects and helps organize books at the donation site throughout the year. 

"It's very social, lots of fun," he said. "I don't miss medicine, I miss the socialization. This isn't work, I'd pay to do this."