Through December 30th, Open Books is offering you a trade. You drop off a donation of books for prisoners, and they will let you select a free book from their back stacks. Pretty good deal, huh? You get to free up some shelf space at the house, score a new thin volume from Wallingford’s poetry temple, all while indirectly but meaningfully helping to reduce the recidivism rate!
Open Books is working in collaboration with Books to Prisoners, a Seattle-based nonprofit that’s been around since the early 1970s. The group’s website includes a list of the sorts of genres that prisoners request the most, so see if you’ve got any of these kinds of books lying around:
-Dictionaries (including Spanish-English dictionaries)
-Thesauruses
-Books on starting/running businesses
-Trade books (including plumbing, electricity, carpentry, construction, auto mechanics)
-Legal self-help
-Black history and fiction, Native American history and fiction
-GED preparation materials
-Puzzle and game books (including chess, crosswords, sudoku, and role-playing manuals)
-Drawing instruction, source books (including tattooing), blank notebooks
-Westerns, thrillers, murder mysteries, horror novels
-True crime
-Books on the occult, aliens, conspiracy theories, and New Age
If you’ve never been to Open Books before, this program gives you all the more reason to go. Booksellers Billie Swift and Alexander are knowledgeable and wonderful and always give you plenty of space to explore, which you’ll want to do. The other week I was there listening to Ari Banias, Bill Carty, and Stacy Tran read new poems. Though the reading was amazing, but I kept getting distracted by the spines beside me. I wanted to know what the zen Korean poets were up to these days. I wanted to read that one book by Anne Carson that everyone except for me has read. I wanted to sift through Seattle poet Quenton Baker’s new book This Glittering Republic and Seattle poet/artist Anastacia Renee Tolbert’s 2015 book 26 and Seattle poet Imani Sims’s new book (A)Live at Heart. You will too.
