Friends of the Tompkins County Public Library Booksale

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The Friends of the Tompkins County Public Library Booksale is a twice annual event which is billed as the third largest event of its type in the United States. This is quite a feat considering the diminuative size of the city of Ithaca, NY which was as of 2005 about 30,000 people. Each year, the Friends of the Ithaca Library are able to fill a warehouse with hundreds of thousands of community-donated books, puzzles, audio cassettes, CDs, and vinyl albums for two sales, one in October and the other in April and/or May. Each sale is approximately two weeks in length and the prices of items continually decreases until on the final day one can purchase a "Wegmans" supermarket bag full of books for $1.

The booksale is a major community event for residents of the area and students and faculty of Ithaca College and Cornell University. Some people even camp outside of the warehouse before the first day of the sale. While some of these people are ardent bibliophiles looking to expand their own collections, many of them are used book dealers looking to purchase items at the low prices of the booksale and then resell them with a markup at their own businesses. For this reason, buyers are limited to fifty purchases per visit on the first day of the sale.

The money earned from the sale is used to support the Tompkins County Public Library which is a part of the Finger Lakes Library System. The original Ithaca Free Library was a gift from Ezra Cornell- a local farmer, inventor, investor and Republican politician and most notably, the founder of his eponymous University. At the end of the sale, leftover materials are donated to non-profit organizations, teachers and home schoolers.