The smell of books is in the air…

What’s the point of having a larger office space if we can’t fill it with books, right? We’re pretty sure a lot of you are on board with that sentiment, but the bittersweet part of it is that we can’t keep any of them.

This is the equal-parts-awesome-and-depressing angle of our end-of-year fundraiser: we get to see some really cool stuff come in from donors, and we get to send it all out to people who will absolutely love it…but then it’s gone. So that’s sad until we remember that it all went out because we raised a TON of money for Heifer International! That makes it a net win.

Sorting, cataloging, and processing all the donations has to start somewhere, and this year we’re starting with the 95 boxes of books donated to us this August by a certain Mr. John Scalzi! Behold:

And we’re not done yet. We still have a dozen boxes to get through.

If you’ve been following our crazy exploits over the years, you might remember that Pat started running the fundraiser with a single 3′ x 5′ bookshelf of books. Last year, we very nearly ran out of space on our lottery shelves at the old office. This summer when we moved everything to the new office, we had to add over 20 feet (about 6 meters) of shelves to cover the walls in our new lottery area.

So Scalzi’s donation is eating up about the same amount of space we had for all the donated books last year. Jenny, Rachel, Maria, and Brett have been sorting and shelving them all to make sure they’re in good shape and they’re not parts two and five of an 11-book series. We don’t want to start you in the middle of things.

We have to work fast, because Subterranean Press usually sends their donation in pretty early, and we’ll need this shelf space for donations from them, DAW, and all the rest of our awesome sponsors. Every year we try to take one photo that shows all the books we’ll have in the lottery. It looks like this is the first year we won’t be able to do that!

Well, enough blogging, we have books to sort, a video to shoot, and an entire fundraiser to plan! Stay tuned for our launch announcement, and probably more photos of our prize wall. Or, we suppose, walls.