In This Guide
- The Post-Sale Problem
- Friends of the Library Groups Across NM
- Why Leftovers Pile Up
- What NMLP Does with Leftovers
- The Environmental Angle
- Bulk Pickup Logistics
- Ongoing Partnerships
- What Categories Tend to Be Left Over
- For Friends Group Leadership
- Books That Don’t Sell at Any Stage
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Related Pages
The Moment Every Volunteer Knows
Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred
The Post-Sale Problem
Every Friends of the Library group in New Mexico knows this moment. The sale is over. The last shoppers have left. The cash box is counted, and the total is good — maybe better than last year, maybe about the same. The volunteers who have been running the operation for the past three days are exhausted in the particular way that only repeated bending, lifting, and standing on concrete for hours can produce. And now everyone is looking at the same thing: forty boxes, maybe sixty, maybe a hundred and twenty, of unsold books that need to go somewhere before Monday morning.
This is the part of the library book sale that nobody talks about at the planning meeting. The acquisition is exciting — sorting through the donations, discovering the first editions, pricing the coffee table books. The sale itself is a community event, with regulars who show up at opening and new faces who wander in on Sunday afternoon. But the aftermath is a logistics problem, and it lands on a small group of volunteers who are already spent.
The storage room is already full from last year. Or two years ago. Some groups have rented storage units specifically for this purpose, paying monthly fees to house books that did not sell at the previous sale and will not sell at the next one either, because the same books that did not move in October are not going to move in April. The inventory accumulates. The storage costs add up. And every year, the question gets asked again at the board meeting: what do I do with the leftovers?
I am Josh Eldred, and I run the New Mexico Literacy Project out of my warehouse at 5445 Edith Blvd NE in Albuquerque. This page is written specifically for that moment — when the sale is done, the volunteers are tired, and the unsold inventory needs a responsible home. I have been handling library sale leftovers from Friends groups across New Mexico for years, and I want to explain exactly what I do, how the logistics work, and why this partnership makes sense for your group.
If you already know you want to schedule a pickup and just need the number, it is 702-496-4214. Call or text. If you want to understand the full picture first, keep reading.
The Landscape
Friends of the Library Groups Across New Mexico
New Mexico has an active network of Friends of the Library organizations, and nearly every one of them runs book sales as a primary fundraising mechanism. The scale varies dramatically from group to group, but the post-sale problem is universal.
The Albuquerque and Bernalillo County library system is the largest in the state, and the Friends of the Albuquerque Public Library organization supports all eighteen branches. The Main Library downtown, the Ernie Pyle branch in the Highlands, Lomas Tramway on the east side, Taylor Ranch on the west side, the South Valley, the North Valley, Erna Fergusson, Juan Tabo, Cherry Hills — each branch generates its own stream of weeded and donated books that feed into the Friends sale infrastructure. The annual sale at the Main Library is one of the largest book sales in the state, and the volume of unsold material after a multi-day event of that scale is substantial. I am talking about hundreds of boxes, not dozens.
The Santa Fe Public Library has its own active Friends group. Santa Fe is a different book market than Albuquerque — heavier on art books, architecture, Southwest history, and literary fiction, reflecting the community that donates to the library. The Friends of the Santa Fe Public Library run sales that draw buyers from across northern New Mexico, and the unsold inventory skews toward the same categories that define the city: oversized art catalogs, coffee table books on regional artists, and literary fiction that accumulates faster than any sale can move it.
Down south, the Thomas Branigan Memorial Library in Las Cruces has a Friends group that holds regular sales serving the entire Dona Ana County area. Las Cruces generates a different kind of inventory — heavier on NMSU textbooks, agricultural and scientific titles, and bilingual material reflecting the Paso del Norte border community. The Taos Public Library Friends group operates in a town where the book-per-capita density might be the highest in the state, given the concentration of writers, artists, and academics. Their sales tend to produce interesting leftovers because the donation pool itself is eclectic.
The Los Alamos County Library system deserves special mention. Los Alamos has one of the best-funded Friends groups in New Mexico, reflecting a community with exceptionally high education levels and household incomes. The Los Alamos Friends of the Library sale is legendary among book dealers and collectors statewide because the donation pool draws from a population of scientists, engineers, and researchers — many of them retired from the national laboratory. The technical and scientific books that surface in Los Alamos are unlike anything you see at other library sales in the state. The leftovers from a Los Alamos sale might include graduate-level physics textbooks, obscure monographs on materials science, and Cold War-era government publications that would be unrecognizable to a general buyer but carry real collector interest.
Rio Rancho’s Loma Colorado Library has a growing Friends organization that mirrors the city’s rapid population growth. As Rio Rancho has expanded, the library system has expanded with it, and the Friends group has scaled its sale operations accordingly. Smaller communities — Belen, Socorro, Silver City, Ruidoso, Gallup, Farmington — also have Friends groups or library volunteer organizations that run sales, and all of them face the same question when the sale ends: what happens to the unsold boxes?
I work with Friends groups across this entire spectrum. The logistics adjust to the location and the scale, but the service is the same: free pickup, individual assessment, responsible handling of every book.
The Math
Why Leftovers Pile Up
The arithmetic of a library book sale is straightforward, and the numbers explain why the leftovers problem is structural rather than incidental. A typical mid-sized Friends of the Library sale in New Mexico brings in somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 donated books over the course of a collection year. Some of those come from library weeding — the branch librarians pull titles from circulation that are damaged, outdated, or redundant — and some come from community donations, which are the boxes and bags that patrons drop off throughout the year.
At the sale itself, depending on pricing, location, weather, marketing, and a dozen other variables, maybe 40 to 60 percent of the inventory sells. A good sale might move 60 percent. A tough sale — bad weather, competing community events, a location that is hard to find — might move 35 percent. Let us call it 50 percent as a working average, which is generous for most groups.
If you started with 15,000 books and sold half, you now have 7,500 unsold books. That is roughly 250 banker’s boxes. At roughly 30 books per box, depending on format — hardcovers pack heavier, paperbacks pack lighter — you are looking at a significant volume of material that needs to go somewhere. And this is from a single sale.
Now consider what happens over multiple years. If your group runs two sales a year and retains the unsold inventory each time, hoping to offer it again at the next sale, the accumulated backlog grows quickly. After three years of twice-annual sales, you might have 20,000 to 30,000 books in storage that have already been offered for sale at least once and did not find buyers. Many of those books were offered two, three, or four times. They are not going to sell at your next event either, because the buyer pool is largely the same group of community members and local dealers who already passed on them.
The storage becomes the constraint. I have talked to Friends group leaders who are paying monthly storage unit fees to house unsold book sale inventory. I have talked to groups that have commandeered basement rooms at the library itself, stacking boxes floor to ceiling in spaces that the library staff needs for other purposes. I have talked to groups where individual volunteers are storing boxes in their garages and living rooms because there is simply nowhere else to put them. The emotional weight of this is real — these are book people, and the idea of discarding books feels wrong. But the physical reality of thousands of unsold books in a space that was not designed to hold them creates genuine operational problems.
This is exactly where NMLP fits into the picture. I take the accumulated backlog off your hands, I handle every book with individual attention rather than bulk disposal, and I do it at no cost to your group. The storage problem disappears. The guilt disappears. And the books go somewhere productive rather than sitting in a unit or a basement getting older and moldier. The same service applies to bookstores closing and liquidating inventory — I take the remaining stock as a free donation pickup and clear the shelves in one visit.
The Process
What NMLP Does with Library Sale Leftovers
This is the part that distinguishes what I do from every other option available to a Friends group trying to move unsold inventory. Most disposal paths treat leftover books as bulk material. Goodwill puts them on a shelf for a set period, then bales and discards what does not sell. A recycler takes the whole load and processes it as paper stock without looking at individual titles. A dumpster is a dumpster. All of these approaches treat every book the same, regardless of what it actually is.
I do not do that. Every book that comes through my warehouse at 5445 Edith Blvd NE gets individually assessed. I am not exaggerating this point for marketing purposes — it is literally the operational model. A volunteer or employee picks up each book, checks the title and author, evaluates the condition, and determines the appropriate channel. This takes time. It is labor-intensive. But it is the only way to catch the valuable books mixed into a pile of common titles, and it is the only way to ensure that good reading copies go to readers rather than recyclers.
The assessment sorts books into three broad streams. The first stream is collectibles and resale titles. These are the books with genuine market value: first editions, signed copies, scarce regional titles, out-of-print Southwest books, vintage children’s books, academic monographs with ongoing demand, and the occasional genuine rarity that nobody at the sale recognized. These get listed individually through my eBay store and other online marketplaces, priced accurately based on current market data. This is how I fund the operation — the revenue from individually listed books supports the entire infrastructure of free pickups, sorting labor, and community redistribution.
The second stream is community reading copies. These are books in solid condition that have reading life left in them but do not carry enough individual market value to justify listing. Current fiction, popular nonfiction, children’s books, cookbooks, hobby books, and general-interest titles — the kind of books that somebody would be glad to pick up and read. These go to APS Title I schools, community reading programs, Little Free Libraries across the metro, after-school programs, and social service organizations that serve populations with limited access to books.
The third stream is responsible recycling. Books that are damaged beyond reading use — water damage, mold, missing pages, broken bindings, severe foxing — and books that are dated beyond any reasonable use — the 1997 internet guides, the 2003 Albuquerque phone books, the medical references from the era before the current standard of care — go to my paper recycling partner. They are processed as clean paper stock, not landfilled as mixed waste. The distinction matters: recycling recovers the material, while landfilling buries it under dirt and plastic where it generates methane as it decomposes.
Here is why this matters for your Friends group specifically. Mixed into those forty or sixty or a hundred boxes of unsold sale inventory are books that someone at your pricing table set at a dollar or two because they did not recognize what they were looking at. This is not a criticism of your volunteers — sale pricing is done under time pressure by generalists who cannot possibly know every title. But that dollar-table hardcover might be a first printing of a Tony Hillerman novel worth considerably more. That Southwest history book with the plain cover might be an out-of-print title with steady collector demand. That signed copy of a regional poetry collection might have gone unnoticed because the signature is on the half-title page where a buyer browsing at a crowded sale table would not think to look. my individual assessment catches these. Every single one.
Responsible Handling
The Environmental Angle
Books are physical objects made of paper, binding adhesives, cover board, and sometimes leather, cloth, or laminate. When a book goes to the landfill, it does not simply disappear. It sits in a lined pit, covered with layers of soil and plastic sheeting, and decomposes anaerobically — which means it generates methane, a greenhouse gas roughly eighty times more potent than carbon dioxide over a twenty-year horizon. A single book is a trivial contribution. Several thousand books from a library sale, multiplied by dozens of Friends groups across the state, multiplied by decades of annual sales, is not trivial.
The Albuquerque area sends waste to the Cerro Colorado landfill on the west side. Bernalillo County’s solid waste authority has been working to extend the landfill’s lifespan, and every cubic yard of material that can be diverted through recycling or reuse extends that timeline. Books are an easy diversion target because they are almost entirely paper — a clean, recyclable commodity — if they are separated from the mixed waste stream before disposal.
NMLP operates on a zero-landfill principle for book inventory. Nothing that comes through my warehouse ends up in a landfill. Books with reading or collector value continue to circulate. Books that are truly past use go to my paper recycling partner, where the fiber is recovered and reprocessed. The binding materials — glue, thread, cover board — are separated during the recycling process. It is not a perfect system, but it is dramatically better than putting boxes of books at the curb on trash day, which is what happens when a Friends group runs out of options and storage space simultaneously.
For Friends groups that include environmental responsibility in their organizational mission — and many do, because libraries and environmental literacy are natural allies — the NMLP partnership gives you a concrete answer to the disposal question. You are not landfilling books. You are not bulk-discarding them. You are routing them through a process that recovers maximum value, whether that value is collector, reading, or material.
If you want to communicate this to your membership, you can honestly say that every book from your sale — sold or unsold — ends up either in a reader’s hands or in a recycling stream. None of it goes in the ground. That is a straightforward environmental message that your board can present with confidence, and it applies to the entire leftover inventory, not just the attractive titles.
How It Works
Bulk Pickup Logistics
The logistics of picking up library sale leftovers are simpler than most Friends groups expect. Here is the process from start to finish.
Step One: Call or Text
Contact me at 702-496-4214. Tell me which Friends group you are with, roughly how much inventory you have (number of boxes or a general description like “half a room full” is fine — you do not need an exact count), where the books are located, and when you need them picked up. If your sale has not happened yet and you want to schedule the pickup in advance, even better. I can have the date on the calendar before the sale starts so the post-sale logistics are already handled.
Step Two: Schedule the Pickup
I find a date and time that works for your group. For library locations, this usually means coordinating with the branch manager or facilities staff to ensure loading dock access or building access. For storage unit pickups, it means meeting someone with the unit key. For cases where the books are in a volunteer’s garage, it means setting up a time when someone is home. The scheduling is flexible and I work around your constraints, not the other way around.
Step Three: I bring the Truck
On the scheduled date, I show up with the truck and load the books. If the books are in boxes, I load the boxes. If the books are on tables or shelves from the sale and nobody has boxed them yet, I will box them or load them loose — whatever makes sense for the situation. You do not need to have everything perfectly packed and organized. You do not need to sort by category, by condition, or by anything else. I take it all.
Step Four: The Room Is Clear
After the pickup, the room, storage unit, garage, or wherever the books were is empty. Your Friends group has no more storage burden, no more boxes to step over, no more monthly storage fees. The books are at my warehouse, where the individual assessment process begins. That process takes time — weeks for a large load — but from your group’s perspective, the problem is solved the moment the truck pulls away.
No boxing required, though it helps. No sorting required. No minimum quantity. No charge. The entire pickup service is free for Friends of the Library groups across New Mexico.
Beyond the One-Time Pickup
Ongoing Partnerships
The most effective arrangement is not a one-time pickup. It is an ongoing partnership where NMLP becomes the default destination for your group’s unsold inventory after every sale. Several Friends groups in New Mexico have already established this kind of standing relationship with me, and it transforms the entire post-sale experience.
Here is how it works in practice. Your group runs its spring sale. The sale ends on Saturday afternoon. On Monday or Tuesday — whatever date I agreed on in advance — I show up with the truck and take everything that did not sell. The volunteers go home on Saturday knowing that the leftovers are handled. Nobody has to spend Sunday boxing and hauling. Nobody has to coordinate a Goodwill drop-off. Nobody has to figure out where to store the boxes until the next sale. It is done.
Then your group runs its fall sale. Same process. The leftover pickup is already on the calendar from the beginning of the planning process, scheduled alongside the venue booking, the volunteer sign-ups, and the publicity plan. It becomes a standard line item in the sale logistics rather than a scramble after the fact.
Some groups I work with do this twice a year, timed to their semi-annual sales. Others have a quarterly rhythm because they accept donations year-round and periodically need to clear the accumulation even between sales. A few groups operate small ongoing sales — a permanent shelf in the library lobby or a mini-sale table in the community room — and schedule periodic pickups to clear the slow-moving inventory from those as well. Whatever cadence matches your group’s operations, I can accommodate it.
The ongoing partnership also changes how your group thinks about inventory management. When you know the leftovers have a responsible destination, you can be more aggressive about accepting community donations throughout the year. You do not have to turn away the person who shows up with twelve boxes from a deceased relative’s house, because you know the surplus has somewhere to go. The pipeline stays open. The community keeps donating. Your sale inventory stays fresh. And the unsold remainder disappears into my assessment process rather than into your storage room.
One call to 702-496-4214 establishes the partnership. After that, it runs on its own rhythm with minimal coordination needed from sale to sale.
What Stays on the Tables
What Categories Tend to Be Left Over
After working with library sale leftovers for years, I have a clear picture of what consistently does not sell at Friends of the Library events. Understanding these categories might be useful for your group’s sale planning, and it also illustrates why individual assessment matters — because mixed into these “unsellable” categories are books with genuine value that get missed in the bulk.
Mass market paperbacks are the single largest category of unsold inventory at most library sales. The small, rack-sized paperbacks — romances, thrillers, mystery series, science fiction — accumulate in huge quantities and sell only a fraction. Most buyers at a library sale are looking for hardcovers, trade paperbacks, or specific titles. The mass market section gets browsed but not bought in proportion to its volume. After the sale, boxes and boxes of Danielle Steel, Tom Clancy, Nora Roberts, and James Patterson paperbacks remain. These are reading copies with minimal individual resale value, but they are still perfectly functional books. Through my community redistribution, they end up in waiting rooms, halfway houses, shelters, and other settings where a light read is exactly what someone needs.
Outdated nonfiction is the second major category. Diet books from 2008. Technology guides for Windows Vista. Travel guides for a Europe that no longer exists at the prices listed. Self-help books whose moment passed a decade ago. Business books about management philosophies that companies have long since abandoned. These are the books that were current when they were donated to the library, and by the time they reach the Friends sale three or four years later, they have aged past their usefulness. Most of these go to recycling in my process, because there is no reading community for a 2006 guide to MySpace marketing.
Encyclopedias are a perennial problem. Every Friends group I have talked to has encyclopedia sets in storage — Britannica, World Book, Americana, Funk & Wagnalls, Compton’s. Nobody buys encyclopedia sets at library sales anymore, for the obvious reason that the internet made them obsolete as reference tools. But people keep donating them because they cannot bring themselves to discard something that cost several hundred dollars originally. I accept encyclopedias. The vast majority go to paper recycling. But occasionally a pre-1950 Britannica set or a specialty encyclopedia — a 1911 Eleventh Edition, for instance — has genuine collector value, and my assessment catches those.
Textbooks from any era are slow sellers at library sales. Community buyers generally do not want a Principles of Economics textbook, regardless of the edition. Some STEM textbooks hold value through the used textbook market, but that market is specialized and inaccessible to a Friends group running a weekend sale.
And then there are the surprises. This is the part that makes individual assessment essential. Mixed in with the unsold mass market paperbacks and the outdated nonfiction are books that nobody at the sale recognized. Southwest titles by regional publishers that did not look flashy on the sale table but carry real collector demand. First editions that were not identified as such because the pricing volunteer did not check the copyright page. Signed copies where the signature is on the half-title page or the front free endpaper — not immediately visible to a browser scanning spines at a crowded table. Vintage children’s books that were tossed in a box with the mass markets because they looked old and worn. Books in Native languages or about Pueblo communities that have specialized collector markets far beyond what a general-audience library sale can reach.
I have pulled signed Tony Hillerman firsts out of dollar boxes from library sale leftovers. I have found collections of regional history titles that a dealer would have paid real money for, sitting unsorted in a storage unit between sales. I have identified UNM Press and University of Oklahoma Press first editions in Southwest history that were marked at two dollars and did not sell because they were shelved between a Dean Koontz paperback and a 2004 Atkins diet book. These finds are not rare anomalies — they happen in almost every library sale leftover load I process. The books are there. They just need someone who knows what to look for.
Making the Case
For Friends Group Leadership
If you are the president, sale chair, or board member of a Friends of the Library group and you want to propose the NMLP partnership to your board, here is the case in the terms that matter to a volunteer board making decisions about organizational resources.
The Cost
Zero. The pickup is free. There is no charge per box, no transportation fee, no per-item cost. NMLP funds its operations through the resale of individually listed books — the collectibles and specialty titles that surface during my assessment process. The pickup and sorting are subsidized by the revenue from those titles. Your Friends group bears no cost.
The Storage Savings
If your group is paying for storage — a rented unit, a portion of a shared facility, or even just the opportunity cost of library space being used for unsold books — the NMLP partnership eliminates that expense immediately. A 10x10 storage unit in Albuquerque runs somewhere around mid-range prices to mid-range collectible prices per month. Over a year, that is nearly three-figure collector prices to four-figure prices that your group could redirect to its library support mission instead of paying rent on books that are not going to sell at the next event.
The Volunteer Burden
Post-sale cleanup is the least popular volunteer task in any Friends organization. The people who enjoy sorting, pricing, and running the sale are doing it because they love books and community engagement. The people who have to figure out what to do with 80 boxes of unsold inventory on Sunday afternoon are doing it because nobody else will. The NMLP partnership removes this task entirely. The post-sale conversation shifts from “who is going to deal with the leftovers?” to “NMLP is coming Tuesday.”
The Environmental Story
Every book that leaves your sale through NMLP is either read again or recycled. None of it goes to the landfill. This is a straightforward environmental benefit that your group can communicate to its membership, the library board, and the community. For grant applications, annual reports, or membership appeals that reference sustainability, the zero-landfill partnership with NMLP is a concrete data point.
The Pitch to Your Board
Here is sample language you can adapt for a board presentation or a motion at your next meeting: “I propose that I establish an ongoing partnership with the New Mexico Literacy Project for the disposal of unsold book sale inventory. NMLP provides free bulk pickup after each sale, individually assesses every book for collector and reading value, redistributes usable books to community reading programs and schools, and responsibly recycles the remainder. There is no cost to my organization. This eliminates my storage expenses, reduces volunteer burden after each sale, and ensures that my unsold inventory is handled responsibly rather than landfilled. I recommend I schedule My first pickup for the conclusion of my upcoming sale and evaluate the partnership after one cycle.”
That is the pitch. It is simple because the arrangement is simple. If your board has questions I have not addressed here, call me directly at 702-496-4214 and I will answer them.
Total Honesty
What About Books That Don’t Sell at Any Stage?
I want to be transparent about this because I think Friends groups deserve honest answers rather than feel-good vagueness. Some books that come through my assessment process have zero market value and no remaining reading life. They did not sell at your library sale, they will not sell through my channels, and no community reading program wants them. They are, by any reasonable measure, at the end of their functional existence as books.
The books in this category are predictable. Water-damaged books where the pages are wavy, stained, or stuck together. Mold-affected books that present a health concern and cannot be placed in circulation regardless of their content. Books with missing pages, detached covers, or broken bindings that make them physically unusable as reading copies. And then the content-obsolete titles: the 1990 Albuquerque phone book, the 2005 Fodor’s guide to Prague, the 1998 Windows 98 for Dummies, the medical reference that predates current treatment protocols by two decades, the tax preparation guide from the era before the current code.
These books go to my paper recycling partner. They do not go to the landfill. The paper fiber is recovered and reprocessed into new paper products. The binding materials are separated and handled appropriately. It is not the outcome that any book lover wants — nobody gets into Friends of the Library work because they dream of recycling books — but it is the responsible outcome for material that has genuinely reached the end of its useful life.
The key distinction is that I make this determination on a book-by-book basis, not in bulk. I do not look at a box labeled “old nonfiction” and send the whole box to recycling without opening it. I open the box, pull out each book, and assess it individually. The 2005 travel guide goes to recycling. The first-edition Southwest title that was in the same box goes to my listing queue. The readable recent novel goes to community redistribution. The sorting is the work, and the sorting is what makes the difference between responsible handling and bulk disposal.
I mention this because I have found that Friends groups respond better to honesty than to promises that every donated book will find a loving home. Some will. Many will. But some are past that point, and acknowledging that reality is part of handling the leftovers responsibly. What I can promise is that the determination is made individually, not in bulk, and that even the books at the end of their life are recycled rather than landfilled.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you pick up library sale leftovers for free?
How much notice do you need?
Is there a minimum number of boxes?
What do you do with books nobody wants?
Can you pick up from storage units where I keep unsold inventory?
Do you work with Friends groups outside Albuquerque?
Can I set up a recurring partnership?
What about magazines, DVDs, and other media from the sale?
Do you take encyclopedias?
How is NMLP different from just calling Goodwill?
Schedule Your Post-Sale Pickup
Free bulk pickup of unsold library sale inventory anywhere in New Mexico. No sorting, no boxing, no minimum, no cost to your group.
Call or Text 702-496-4214NMLP is a for-profit business. I fund free pickups through the resale of individually identified collectible and specialty titles. I am transparent about my model because I believe trust matters.