I Love: Bag Day Book Sales

This is an old favorite tradition of mine I picked up in nursing school, there’s a certain magic to a used book sale. Libraries often have them to get rid of excess inventory or books they no longer want to house, as it also raises money for them (which is more important now than ever). I never show up looking for particular titles, more often I’m looking for a genre or type of book. One year I wanted cookbooks, political history and biographies. This last year I was hunting for graphic novels, manga, poetry and books with beautiful calligraphy. Sometimes you get a book because the title amuses you, this is how I’ve come to own a few titles of Amish fiction, the premises of which I find amusing. Like, oh, Jebediah, I love you so much, I’ll never use a toaster again!

The books at these sales are always affordable but this is especially true on what’s almost always the final day of the sale, which is bag day. How this works is that you pay a set amount for a bag, some places you can bring a tote of any size and others they give you a flimsy, cheap bag you have to pay to replace if it breaks. Either way, you pay the amount per bag and any book you put in it is yours. This leads to a fun challenge of space management, also not having eyes and ambitions bigger than your arms can carry (I have many painful memories of lugging huge, heavy bags of books back to my apartment, book nerds are often not muscley!) I own many beautiful coffee table books because of Bag Day and I especially enjoy trawling the local books sections as I’m not native to Denver and I want to learn as much as I can about the home I come to love more and more <3