NAHANT — Nahant Public Library Board of Trustees met on Tuesday and discussed upcoming programming, specifically the launch of their new eBay page, where they will be selling rare books and collections that have been donated through the book sale.
The library’s seller page, friendsofnahantpubliclibrary, features a rare, first-edition issue of Theodore Roosevelt’s “The Wilderness Hunter” from 1893, which currently has a bid for $75. The largest bid is for “Poems” by Emily Dickinson from 1896, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, currently at $1,000.
“We were pleasantly surprised that we might have this extra source of revenue for selling some of these books,” Library Director Nori Morganstein said. “Cross your fingers that we keep having this amazing luck with it.” The Library has already sold three items, including “War and Peace” by Tolstoy Heritage Press from 1938, a used copy of “The Flying Trapez: Three Crises for Physicists” by J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Theodor Mommsen’s “A History of Rome” from 2006.
Friends of the Library President Cecile Rouleau said that this is something they’ve been looking to start “for a few years,” but they just needed to find the right platform for it.
“Winnie Hodges, who is one of the founders of the Friends, donated her American Heritage magazine collection, over 90 magazines. They’re all hard covers [and] it’s a beautiful collection,” Rouleau explained. “She was hoping that we would find the right buyer for it, that we would be able to monetize it, so it sort of became the trigger we needed to get that going.”
They’ve already had someone reach out to donate an entire collection of their books and are continuing to add more rare books; on Tuesday, they had just uploaded 191 volumes of American Heritage the Magazine of History spanning from 1954-1984.
“This is a really wonderful thing,” Trustee Anne Bromer exclaimed, adding: “It has such a wide audience, millions and millions, tens of millions of people look at eBay, so, very clever. Congratulations!”
Ahead of the next meeting, Morganstein plans on also going through the books that are inside the Library’s attic that have aged over time and are falling apart. “These are books that we can’t even really put on eBay. They’ve disintegrated in the attic and I but I still want to just keep a record of it,” she told the Board, who agreed that she should be the one to handle.
