The Shepherdstown Community Club has spent another year gathering books from the community for our annual Legendary Book Sale. This year it is Oct. 11-14. Check it out on our website, www.shepherdstowncc.org, our Facebook Group (some FB specials here exclusively!) and our advertisement in The Shepherdstown Chronicle.

What do we learn when we do this book sale? First, we learn how many people love to drop off books behind the War Memorial Building regularly. We learn that almost no one wants books destroyed. An anthropologist might write that these objects are treated like something sacred in our culture. Everybody who reads, has books they no longer have room for, and wants someone else to have a chance to read them, it seems. In fact, a friend of a friend has written on The Gift, as a social shared good thing in this respect and there is a copy in the sale this year. Besides a Bible, we learn that almost everyone has a copy of Walden in their book collections. Riddle me that one, Batman? (Yes, we have him in graphic novel form as well).

We learn that we sometimes have a “find”; last year learning after we sold an old, kinda battered Betty Crocker Cookbook that it was the edition which had young Andy Warhol’s earliest commercial work — perfect minimalist stick figure knives, spoons and plates. We reached out through this paper offering to buy back the book to donate to his museum, but we heard nothing. What have we missed this year already in a donation year which tops, as Shakespeare writes, all previous years?

Let me count the books, but I can’t just know there are two full storage units at Valley Storage, one storing for a whole year, and we say “Thanks.”

Mark and Nancy Kohut, Shepherdstown Community Club members