Out of print: After nearly 40 years, Newberry Book Fair is done

There is no shortage of used books in this city. You can find them in informal little libraries in neighborhood parks, and in community libraries requiring library cards, and in overstuffed storefronts filled with yellowing pages lacking dust covers, smelling of attics, wrapped in the plastic jackets of far-away suburban libraries.

But since 1985, the Newberry Library’s annual book fair had been the Chicago used-book-apalooza.

For 38 summers, if you were a reader, a writer or an antique obsessive, it was a must-visit: tens of thousands of donated books arranged into 70 categories, spread before thousands of book lovers, who leave a sizable chunk of change for the Newberry, a free 136-year old nonprofit literary research institution. The Newberry itself estimates that more than 10,000 books were taken for its gigantic collection after being donated to the book fair. The event, said Bill Charles, its lead volunteer in recent years, was a warm handshake with a big city — and neighborhood — not always schooled on the Newberry.

“I had always thought of it as the best, smartest public relations,” he said, “especially for a pretty academic place. Every year, without fail, someone who lived nearby would wander in during the fair and say that they had no idea what went on in this building.”

Still, the Newberry Library Book Fair is being pulped.

At a pair of recent meetings, administrators informed volunteers that the largely volunteer-run event would be discontinued, off the calendar, permanently shelved.

“I was gobsmacked,” Charles said.

Several volunteers at those meetings said no alternative to the popular book fair was offered or discussed. “The entire leadership team ultimately discussed the decision,” a library spokesman confirmed. But the final decision came from Gail Kern Paster, the Newberry’s interim president and librarian; she’s been interim president since April and leaves on Nov. 30, to make way for a new president, Astrida Orle Tantillo, formerly the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Paster said that after “deliberate conversations” with senior staff — particularly those staff in the development and public engagement offices who worked closely with the fair — she made the call, and “I feel very clear it was a good decision — though not a popular one.”

A number of reasons were given. She said the event was a drain on resources, space and staff energy and did not generate enough money to make it worthwhile. She said she didn’t know how much the recent fair in July earned, but core volunteers who spend much of the year preparing it said the library took in at least $75,000 from the weekend.

She said when the library conducts surveys during the book fair, most respondents say the event is the only time they ever come to the Newberry. But primarily, she said, “the Newberry has a strategic plan with some new avenues for public engagement that hosting a book fair does not reflect.” She noted the Pattis Family Foundation Chicago Book Award — started in 2021 to honor books that expand an understanding of the city — as closer to the library’s spirit. Also, the book fair’s annual Bughouse Square Debates in Washington Square Park across from the library — a longtime afternoon of informal speeches, honoring the soapbox tirades in the park (nicknamed Bughouse Square) from the 1880s to 1930s — will continue, as part of a regular Chicago Storytelling series.

But Paster said that when they look over the library’s “core mission” — which includes preserving the collection, growing the collection, making the collection available to readers and serving a community of academic researchers who rely on the collection — having an annual sale of used paperbacks and hardcovers “had become an outlier.”

Several volunteers who spoke to the Tribune about the end of the fair said they had assumed the book fair was about engaging with the public and growing the collection.

They said that they thought an institution as sensitive to tradition as the Newberry always understood the goodwill such a casual event can create within the community.

“My god, putting books in the hands of people who want to read,” said Claudia Hueser, who was a volunteer at the fair for 12 years. “Encouraging a general public not too thrilled about reading Chaucer in Middle English to stop by and justify your existence!

“This is the first time I’m hearing that any of that was a big headache.”

It’s not the first time Dan Crawford’s heard it, though. Crawford was the book fair’s only full-time employee, and managed it from 1995 to 2020, when he was laid off. It had been founded by library donors then nursed through its early years by his aunt, Evelyn Lampe. It became such a tradition many local authors, from Sara Paretsky to Roger Ebert, donated bags of books annually. Peggy Guggenheim donated shelves from her collection, including first editions by Samuel Beckett, a former lover. Aldermen donated family heirlooms. Richard M. Daley wanted to donate law books from his office — “but we had to turn him down because, having done this for years, law books don’t sell.” For years, the library saw the fair as so important it picked up donations from private homes.

Understandably.

Over the years, donated books (often left anonymously) have included first editions of “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, signed copies of art books by Picasso and classics by Hemingway. Last July, someone left a signed first edition of a Yeats poetry collection.

Nevertheless, despite the successes, the event has never sat well with some of the staff, Crawford said. “It was initially seen as a way of getting Chicago into the building, but then you had those people who felt a book sale was low class for such a place. I had a supervisor even tell me that it was too bad such an institution must stoop so low.”

He said he’s disappointed in the Newberry’s decision and found its statements about the fair not fitting into the library’s mission especially vague. “They don’t quite spell out what they mean, and you can’t argue with it because they don’t give you much to argue with.”

For the time, however, the Newberry continues to accept donations of books — though there is nothing on the library’s website that indicates donations are not going to a book fair. Paster said there is a plan to sell a handful of donated books in the library gift shop, with the rest being shipped to ThriftBooks, which bills itself as the world’s largest online independent used bookseller. A percentage of sales through Thrift returns to the library.

In the past, books not sold at the fair would be donated to the Chicago nonprofit Open Books or a number of charities and institutions, from prison libraries to women’s shelters. When the pandemic canceled plans for the 2020 book fair, donations that had been made that year went to ThriftBooks, and the library continued to use the Seattle area-based company, which sells books through a number of websites, including eBay and Amazon.

Susan Levy, who was part of the book fair for 20 years, said volunteers — who spent much of the year sorting and pricing donations in the library’s basement, in anticipation of the event — were told they were invited to sort newly donated books, to select which went to the gift shop and which went to ThriftBooks. She doesn’t plan to return. “I don’t think too many of us who did this are interested in volunteering time to a for-profit business.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com