Goodwill is a hidden treasure for finding books
I have written about most bookstores in our area, at least the ones that carry the type of books I want to read. Except one. Or make that two: The Goodwill Bookstores on Thomasville Road and Mahan Boulevard. Every Goodwill has a section devoted to books, but these are the two stores that specialize in them.
My hesitation has had a purpose. One is selfish. I have spent more time in the two Goodwill bookstores in Tallahassee over the last 10 years than any other bookstore, and I don’t want the competition. Like most people who shop at Goodwill, it is fun to game the system, i.e. find something for little or nothing, although that is becoming increasingly difficult given the sophistication of checking book values on the internet.
The other reason for my hesitation is, that as wonderful as the two Goodwills are (hardly a week goes by that the staffs don’t call me about something they think I would be interested in; they’re usually right), the competition between Goodwill and the other bookstores is not quite fair.
Yes, yes, Goodwill is a nonprofit, 501(c) 3, which helps people find jobs and train for them. But as a “network of independent, community-based organizations in South Korea, Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico, Panama, Uruguay, the United States, Canada, and 8 other countries, with 162 local Goodwill organizations in the United States and Canada” it is still a network, and an international one at that.
Let me be clear: that is not, of itself, a bad thing. They do, of course, have a connection with Amazon, as does ABE Books and a good number of the online sites. If you buy an out-of-print or rare book through Amazon, it is going to come from somewhere else, including Goodwill. But it does make the organization a conglomerate, though one which plows most of its profits back into good work.
The biggest advantage Goodwill has is its lack of overhead with the exception of salaries, of course. The organization owns its own buildings, and it doesn’t have to buy any books to stock the shelves. You get to clean out all your unwanted stuff and take a tax write-off and Goodwill gets the money and plows it back into its operations. This is all very admirable, but I suspect that many local bookstores have mixed feelings when Goodwill opens down the street.
In my time shopping at Goodwill Big Bend, the regional organization has tried all sorts of ways to increase the number of shoppers, until I think they realized they didn’t need to. For a long time, Fridays were special discount days for seniors (which, if I remember correctly, started at age 50, bless them). Then they tried a color-coded tag scheme where some weeks (or was it days?) a yellow tag, or blue tag would mean a discount.
They have stopped all that in recent years, and I am grateful they have. First of all, Goodwill’s prices on most books are low enough that they don’t need to discount them any further, and as for increasing the number of shoppers, I’ve never been in either of the two local stores where there weren’t people trying to do what I am trying to do: get a steal.
If you are a serious reader or book collector, the biggest tip I can offer you is to go often. They do shelve nearly 500 books a day at each store, which is a lot. With those kinds of numbers, you can hardly fail to find something. I usually go to each of the bookstores at least once a week, the Thomasville Road bookstore more often because I drive right by it on the way home from work.
In recent years, the staff has started raising the prices on certain of their older books, by checking their sales records on such sites as ABE or Biblio.com. Most of the people who work at Goodwill are not professional bibliophiles, so this can sometimes be problematic. There are a lot of things that go into the proper pricing of old books, condition being a primary one.
I’ve had several friendly donnybrooks with Savannah Cole, who manages both stores, when I thought pricing was out of line. Sometimes I have convinced her to adjust them down; sometimes she throws me out — which, as my wife says, indicates good judgment on her part.
Most of the time they are right on the money in their pricing, like the special edition of "To Kill a Mockingbird," signed by author Harper Lee that somebody donated a few years ago. They priced it at $250. At that price it was a bargain, and I bought it for a friend out of town.
Whenever I mention that I am an afficiando of Goodwill, the question always comes up: “What’s the best thing you ever got there?”
I can’t answer that because there have been so many. But the one that quickly comes to mind wasn’t really a book at all and occurred about six or eight years ago when I stopped in the Thomasville Road store.
Donna Jernigan, Director of Books Sales and E-Commerce for the Big Bend Goodwill, mentioned they had something in the back that they had been meaning to call me about. Out it came: a leather bound photo album of carte de visites photographs of Confederate generals.
Carte de visites were the first photographs printed on paper, a step toward making photography available to the public from the more expensive and time consuming daguerrotypes and ambrotypes, developed on copper and glass respectively. They were marketed during the Civil War for public consumption, and this album was clearly of civil war vintage.
I called my friend Jonathan Sheppard, military historian, who now runs Mission San Luis, and he helped me identify the generals. Two people in the album needed no identification: Robert E. Lee, and John Wilkes Booth, on facing pages, giving an idea of just when it was put together, and what the person who did, thought about things.
So, yes, of course, Goodwill is a bookstore, and most of the time a very good one, particularly if you are not limited to the type of stuff you want to read.
Bob Holladay teaches history at Tallahassee Community College and is president of the Tallahassee Historical Society. Email Bob Holladay at Sentrypress @gmail.com.